Tech Workers Coalition | Blog

Corporate Targets for Tech Worker Activism Against ICE

2026-02-22T00:00:00Z

By Gary Levi, Tech Workers Coalition

Over the last few weeks, following the murders of Renée Good and Alex Pretti, and in the midst of the ongoing occupation in Minneapolis, tech workers have begun to organize against ICE, and particularly the support and complicity of their companies in these attacks on not only immigrants, but the rights and lives of all workers. Along with the recent https://iceout.tech open letter calling on big tech to cancel contracts with ICE (signed by many executives as well as rank and file workers) , over a thousand google workers have signed a letter (https://www.googlers-against-ice.com) calling for divestment from partnership with ICE, and over a thousand salesforce employees have likewise called on their CEO to drop contracts with ICE. Tech has an important role in the vast infrastructure of monitoring and logistics that fuels the deportation and repression machine. As tech workers we have both an ability and a responsibility to fight against it.

The recent protest efforts are very similar to campaigns organized in the first Trump presidency. Then, the “Tech Won’t Build It” and “No Tech for ICE” slogans and campaigns galvanized thousands of workers who submitted letters to CEOs and called on their companies to cut contracts with ICE. Despite significant media coverage and mass public support, these campaigns had no effect on corporate policy, and quietly dissolved over time. Although this wave of organizing fell short of winning demands, it contributed to a legacy of organizing which played an important role in future organizing efforts that won material gains, from union campaigns to Palestine activism and beyond. How can we do things differently this time?

Here I want to provide some personal reflections on this history, and suggest some tactical considerations. The perspective presented here is not that of TWC as a whole, and the tactics touched on are not a call for groups to wholly adopt any one strategic perspective. Rather, each individual workplace campaign will have the most knowledge of its own conditions, the current concerns of those they hope to reach, how management will respond, how they will unite their coworkers, and what horizons they set their sights on. We will need more ongoing discussion and critical reflection across activists as we proceed, and this article is not intended to be a final word, but just part of a continued conversation. Further, this discussion will specifically be about workplace campaigns at large tech companies, not consumer boycott campaigns, nor even workplace campaigns in other industries such as hospitality or retail, in which other targets and tactics may be appropriate.

The most important reason why the No Tech for ICE campaigns of the first Trump administration dried up is that Trump ceased to be president. When Biden carried on Trump’s deportation policies (which were only slightly different from Obama’s deportation policies) and even intensified them, people no longer noticed or were outraged as they had been. In 2020, as is often the case, the Democratic party successfully demobilized mass protest and outrage while maintaining reactionary policies. While we cannot control this element of public sentiment, we can try to organize with clear analysis and open eyes, to prevent perhaps quite as many people from being suckered again.

But why were we not able to make more wins even before Biden demobilized immigration protests? One aspect is a naivete about the role of tech giants and tech CEOs – many still believed in the self-professed “values” of Silicon Valley, which at the time were supposedly liberal and progressive. This meant that there was hope that reasonable, polite asks made on shared values could effect change, rather than hard-nosed oppositional pressure. Now, after the crypto bubble, now in the AI bubble, following waves of layoffs, and with many tech billionaires turned to racism, nationalism, and embrace of Trump in pursuit of Department of Defense contracts, the bloom is fully off the rose, and it is possible we can organize from the understanding that militancy and escalation will be necessary.

I want to suggest a final tactical consideration. ICE contracts are very hard to eliminate – even more than divesting from Israel. These are contracts with the U.S. government, the state that controls, taxes, and regulates most tech companies we organize within. Furthermore, often U.S. government business as a whole constitutes a large part of many corporate revenue streams. Last time around, and from what we have heard, today too, CEOs can make a very effective argument that their “hands are tied” and it is impossible to cancel ICE contracts without losing all U.S. government business, and hence imperiling the finances of their companies. It is not clear how true or realistic this concern is – but it does drive corporate decision making and can be massively demobilizing for those involved in anti-ICE organizing. We can’t let ourselves be swayed from our goals, but we must find ways that allow us to build organizational strength and claim victories even in the face of these obstructions.

One approach we can take is to expand our list of targets, and seek to also exert pressure through more immediately vulnerable contracts than those directly with ICE. In particular, there are many private companies which are deeply tied to ICE and the military-industrial complex, which have a compelling story of why they are as evil or complicit as ICE itself, and where contracts and services can then be denied without CEOs being able to invoke the risk to government contracts as a whole.

A flagship company for this approach is Palantir, which is tied to the ghoulish far-right Peter Thiel, widely known and hated, fully supportive of and massively profiting from the current wave of ICE repression. An existing campaign, Purge Palantir, has already made some inroads in public consciousness, although currently it targets community pressure and political donations, rather than worker action impacting our own employers.

It is quite possible that a campaign might not be able to sever all ICE contracts at a company but could nonetheless cancel provision of cloud services or other contracts specifically to Palantir. Further, Palantir is only the most well known of the many companies profiting from ICE – not even the most well compensated. For fiscal year 2025 ICE contracts, the total outlayed cash to Palantir is about $660 million. This makes it only the thirteenth largest contractor to ICE.

Here is a list of my calculation of the top twenty contractors (data sourced from the custom award data at usaspending.gov):

CSI AVIATION, INC	$9,707,485,430
THE GEO GROUP, INC.	$5,370,665,928
MVM, INC.	$2,068,344,189
CORECIVIC, INC.	$2,028,372,809
B.I. INCORPORATED	$1,672,887,893
INSERSO CORPORATION	$1,484,191,479
AKIMA INFRASTRUCTURE PROTECTION LLC	$1,241,684,376
AKIMA GLOBAL SERVICES, LLC	$1,045,991,175
PARAGON PROFESSIONAL SERVICES LLC	$1,044,183,289
STEAMPUNK, INC.	$819,579,403
WIDEPOINT INTEGRATED SOLUTIONS CORP	$691,184,173
PALANTIR TECHNOLOGIES INC.	$659,800,540
DELOITTE CONSULTING LLP	$610,394,065
CACI, INC. - FEDERAL	$591,706,852
G4S SECURE SOLUTIONS (USA) INC.	$556,405,484
CACI NSS, LLC	$421,025,885
MANAGEMENT & TRAINING CORPORATION	$420,212,896
CLASSIC AIR CHARTER INC.	$379,336,739
ITC FEDERAL, LLC	$347,138,958

Who are these companies?

At the top of the list is CSI Aviation, famous for providing deportation flights, many of which have been, by all accounts, entirely illegal. Also providing similar services is Classic Air Charter. Both are purely private concerns, unlike Avelo airlines, a small commercial carrier, which in a significant victory for anti-ICE protestors, dropped its ICE contract in January.

Another group of contractors are those that run private prisons – Geo Group, CoreCivic and Management & Training Corporation. The former two are targets of the Boycott Citizens campaign, which has targeted Citizens’ Bank for providing them loans and other financial services.

Also notable are a large collection of companies that provide essentially mercenary services – private guards and security, as well as prisoner transportation. This includes MVM, Akima Infrastructure, Paragon Professional and G4S.

Next are companies that provide IT support, infrastructure and services, including network security and data management. This includes Inserso, Akima Global, Steampunk, Widepoint, Deloitte, CACI NSS and ITC.

Of course there is also Palantir, which like CACI Inc, is in the business of providing all three of technology infrastructure, data on private citizens, and analysis.

And finally, there is B.I. Incorporated, which provides electronic monitoring.

All these companies, and many others as well, would constitute good targets for anti-ICE activism. They are mainly not large general purpose companies that happen to have some ICE contracts. These are largely companies that are fully “outsourced” parts of the policing and military apparatus. They provide mercenaries, bounty hunters, prisons and guards, and ICE could not operate without them. Such companies, like ICE, should not exist – and for our organizing purposes, they have the advantage of not being the U.S. government itself. We can research our own companies’ connections to these and other major ICE contractors and subcontractors, and initiate worker-first mass organizing campaigns to cut these ties. This alone won’t end the ICE onslaught – but neither would cutting contracts with ICE. Making it more difficult and expensive for ICE to carry out its terrorism is a worthy goal, but to turn the tide back will require a social mobilization broader than wins at individual workplaces. Political problems have to be solved at the level of high politics. However, it would build our organizing apparatus and consciousness, strengthen our power, provide inspiration for the broader struggle, and flex our muscles at a time when every blow counts. And if we think critically about the leverage we have, in our own workplaces, we have a shot at winning something that makes a difference.

Here we have suggested one set of considerations and one source of targets. But the most important thing is to start with talking to your coworkers, researching and planning together, and taking concrete steps to get organized.

workersdecide.tech: Resources to Fight AI Sloppification At Work

2025-12-12T20:00:00Z

If you are anxious about how AI will impact or is already impacting your job, you don’t just need to doomscroll about it. Collective action can, will, and is making an impact against employers’ attempts to sloppify our jobs, and we’ve started to put together resources at workersdecide.tech to help people get started.

The bubble surrounding generative AI has a broad set of social impacts – from environmental devastation to economic instability to the ongoing drive to make every product somehow worse and less reliable by shoving AI in there – as well as to the very nature of human interaction and knowledge as AI slop drives out real information and connection. It impacts us as well in the workplace, where we spend much of our waking lives – and it is as workers especially that we can organize collectively to resist.

Our experience so far has not been that AI is capable of or going to replace our labor. However, the threat of AI and the use of AI mandates has been used already to drive down wages, institute speedups, and generally degrade our working conditions.

Despite its general lack of economic utility and propensity to lie, corporate bosses continue to roll out new AI initiatives – either forcing workers to train or use AI, or to measure “productivity” gains from such tools through intensified monitoring. Those who argue against this are considered stick-in-the-muds who don’t like progress and don’t like new things, leaving critical workers’ voices isolated and fearful of speaking up.

It doesn’t have to be this way. At a range of companies, workers have started to raise concerns and fight back, and the increasingly broader social “techlash” against Silicon Valley hype-merchants can further embolden our struggles.

A group of organizers pulled together as the AI Chaos Prevention Committee, coming from a range of organizations, including Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, the Times Tech Guild, Turkopticon, workers organized with Code-CWA, as well as DAIR, Tech Workers Coalition, and Collective Action in Tech.

We pooled our experiences, surveyed other workers and put together a website, workersdecide.tech, to serve as a resource for all those wanting to organize to take back control of our workplaces from AI mandates – to let workers, not bosses, decide what tools to use and how we, the experts, can do our jobs best. The site holds a range of organizing tools and resources to help start conversations with coworkers, to suggest demands and organizing tactics, and also to develop effective messaging and broad solidarity that bridges the wide variety of assessments workers have of emerging generative AI technologies.

We’re calling on our fellow tech workers and organizers to do three things:

Most importantly, if there is an AI rollout at your workplace, and if it is something that you do not like, then take a look at the resources, and see how you can make first steps to turning this into an organizing issue that mobilizes others and can impact the boss.
If your friends are running into anti-worker AI policies at your jobs, pass along the website and make the same ask.
We want to hear from you! Write in with articles on your experiences – what management is doing, and how workers feel about it. Better yet, write in with stories about how workers stood up for themselves, and lessons to share to others in the same boat.

This early phase of adoption is where the most possibilities are open – where every company is a new test case, and where how we respond can set precedents and standards for years to come. We can put workers in charge of our tools and conditions if we can take advantage of this crucial moment.

Los [las y les] trabajadores en la industria tecnológica deben luchar contra la represión antiinmigrante y el creciente autoritarismo

2025-06-16T18:00:00Z

La ciudad de Los Ángeles es ahora un campo de batalla en defensa del derecho a la protesta. El 13 de junio de 2025, el gobierno federal tomó la decisión sin precedente de desplegar 700 marines en esa ciudad, además de 4000 miembros de la Guardia Nacional de California, mientras la alcaldesa de LA decretaba un toque de queda en el centro de la ciudad. Todo esto representa un ataque indiscriminado en contra de las libertades civiles fundamentales. Estas acciones represivas sucedieron tras varios días de protestas tanto sindicales como comunitarias en contra de la escalada de redadas de ICE (el Servicio de Control de Inmigración y Aduanas) por toda la ciudad, que ha buscado aislar y aterrorizar violentamente a la comunidad trabajadora latina y angelina en general.

Muchas de las personas en la mira de ICE son trabajadores que laboran en almacenes, tiendas locales y pequeños comercios, junto con sus familias. Muchos más son líderes comunitarios. El líder del sindicato SEIU California, David Huerta, fue arrestado y detenido mientras ICE allanaba un almacén de ropa y ahora enfrenta cargos federales y una posible condena en prisión. Esto representa un ataque inequívoco contra el movimiento sindical y pone de relieve la estrecha relación entre los derechos sindicales y los derechos de los inmigrantes. En respuesta, se han organizado protestas en todo el país impulsadas por el SEIU, a las que otros sindicatos se han unido en solidaridad. Nosotros, como trabajadores del sector tecnológico, debemos hacer nuestra parte.

Los apéndices de la industria tecnológica se extienden mucho más allá de las paredes de las oficinas corporativas. A lo largo de la cadena de valor de la industria tecnológica, hay trabajadores insertos en todos los ámbitos: Amazon emplea a cientos de miles de trabajadores de almacén y logística; Uber, Lyft, Instacart y DoorDash son sólo algunas de las empresas que dependen de trabajadores temporales y repartidores para prestar sus servicios. Estos trabajadores no sólo están sujetos a condiciones miserables, empleos eventuales e inciertos, así como a bajos salarios, sino que son el blanco principal de las redadas de ICE. Independientemente de si realizan trabajo manual o trabajan en un escritorio, ya sea que trabajen en centros de distribución o creando infraestructura tecnológica que facilita la circulación de mercancías, un golpe contra un trabajador es un golpe contra todos.

Estos ataques contra inmigrantes son un ataque contra el movimiento sindical y contra todos los trabajadores. Los trabajadores de la tecnología, en particular, se ven atrapados en esta red de forma extremadamente precaria. No sólo se ataca a los trabajadores temporales y a los que laboran para las aplicaciones digitales, además, el gobierno ha manifestado su deseo de atacar a los trabajadores que cuentan con visa H-1B; muchos de ellos empleados por los gigantes de Silicon Valley. En marzo, TWC organizó un panel: Los derechos de los inmigrantes son derechos laborales: Trabajadores tecnológicos y visas H-1B. En este evento, trabajadores discutieron cómo conectar sus preocupaciones con el proceso de sindicalización y organización. En el sector tecnológico de cuello blanco, tanto como en la manufactura, los nativistas de derecha intentan enfrentar a los inmigrantes con los trabajadores nativos en la búsqueda de empleos. Al hacerlo, ayudan a que la patronal divida a la clase trabajadora culpando de los despidos y recortes de beneficios no a los especuladores que nos explotan sino a nuestros propios compañeros de trabajo. Para construir la solidaridad que una sindicalización y organización de masas requiere, apoyar a los trabajadores inmigrantes y extranjeros no es opcional, sino un aspecto básico y esencial de nuestros esfuerzos a favor de la sindicalización.

No somos ajenos a este tipo de luchas. En 2018, durante el primer mandato de Trump, los jefes de las grandes empresas tecnológicas expresaron su preocupación por los derechos de los inmigrantes y adoptaron, sólo verbalmente, una postura de oposición al gobierno de Trump. Varios directores de tecnología y ejecutivos firmaron el compromiso “Nunca jamás.” Los trabajadores de la tecnología intentaron presionar a sus empleadores para que cumplieran con sus supuestos valores. Nos opusimos a la complicidad y la participación voluntaria de sus empleadores con ICE. Trabajadores de Microsoft, Amazon y otras empresas exigieron “No a la tecnología para ICE”. TWC ayudó a organizar talleres y eventos como “Los trabajadores de la tecnología no lo construirán”, difundiendo el mensaje incluso entre trabajadores de empresas tecnológicas privadas como Palantir.

A medida que Trump y DOGE privatizan las funciones gubernamentales y recortan empleos federales, la administración ha dependido aún más de Palantir para compilar bases de datos y datos de vigilancia, con el fin especial de atacar a los trabajadores inmigrantes. Los ataques contra los derechos de inmigrantes y de quienes los defienden son un ejercicio en el tipo de control social que los fundadores de Palantir venden como su visión para el futuro y como eje central de sus servicios al gobierno estadounidense. Esto no es nada nuevo: la militarización de la industria tecnológica y sus vínculos de violencia contra las poblaciones vulnerables tienen una larga historia. Desde sus orígenes militares, la red de internet fue pensada como una herramienta de espionaje. Desde entonces, y con el apoyo y financiamiento constantes del gobierno, la industria tecnológica ha invertido miles de millones en crear tecnología militar robusta que se usa en campos de guerra, en drones utilizados para vigilar fronteras y protestas, así como en la recolección masiva de datos y comunicaciones personales.

Hoy, ante la ausencia de créditos baratos y la amenaza de una creciente sindicalización incluso en el sector de tecnología, los ejecutivos de esta industria han adoptado con mayor entusiasmo la retórica ultraderechista del gobierno de Trump. Recientemente, cuatro ejecutivos de empresas importantes fueron incorporados a la reserva militar como tenientes coroneles. Hoy, en 2025, nos enfrentamos a circunstancias quizás peores que las de 2018, pero también con menos ilusiones. Ahora, antiguos empleados de Palantir se han unido a las filas de oposición contra esta nueva ronda de espionaje y represión subcontratada. Trabajadores miembros de No Tech for Apartheid (NOTA) y TWC también están apoyando acciones en varias ciudades para luchar contra la maquinaria de deportación que arrasa con la seguridad de varias comunidades vulnerables a la criminalización.

Los trabajadores de la tecnología siguen estando mayoritariamente faltos de sindicatos. Por otro lado, nuestra labor es fundamental en el funcionamiento de la sociedad moderna y del estado. Quienes realizamos este trabajo debemos tener voz y voto en cómo se utiliza: no somos meros peones en un sistema abstracto y dantesco, sino seres humanos con la capacidad de asumir responsabilidad por el resultado de nuestro trabajo. Por ser quienes creamos valor, también tenemos influencia para impulsar el cambio. Debemos aprovechar nuestro poder social para actuar en solidaridad con la comunidad inmigrante, sus organizaciones y el SEIU, y exigir el fin de las deportaciones y las redadas, así como la salida de ICE, la Guardia Nacional y la Infantería de Marina de nuestras ciudades, y que se retiren todos los cargos contra Huerta y todos los manifestantes. Esta nueva ofensiva es un ataque más en la campaña de Trump contra los derechos y el nivel de vida de toda la clase obrera. Durante el gobierno de Biden, incluso mientras continuaban las deportaciones y la represión de ICE, el movimiento de protesta de los trabajadores de la tecnología retrocedió, como suele ocurrir bajo gobiernos demócratas. Necesitamos reaprender las lecciones del pasado y desarrollar nuevas prácticas y tácticas.

Los trabajadores de la tecnología seguirán sumándose a las protestas, pero debemos comenzar a hacerlo en contingentes organizados. (Aquí hay algunos carteles de TWC que se pueden imprimir y usar). Quienes somos ya parte de sindicatos debemos presionar dentro de ellos para que actúen en solidaridad con los inmigrantes. También debemos determinar cómo incorporar estos temas en nuestros esfuerzos de sindicalización, teniendo en cuenta que incluso acciones minoritarias en nuestros lugares de trabajo pueden ejercer presión sobre nuestros jefes. Debemos pensar de forma más estratégica sobre quién tiene el poder y quién controla realmente el resultado de nuestro trabajo, y cómo es posible cambiar la balanza de poder y control. Para ello, debemos comprometernos con nuestra labor a favor de la sindicalización, identificando a los responsables de la toma de decisiones en nuestro lugar de trabajo, encontrando los puntos críticos en la cadena de suministro y animando a nuestros compañeros a unirse a nosotros y a usar nuestro poder colectivo para poner fin a estas atrocidades.

El Sindicato de Trabajadores de Amazon - IBT Local 1 publicó una declaración oficial de solidaridad con la población inmigrante que incluye una lista de demandas para Amazon y la promesa de una respuesta sindical a todo incidente relacionado con inmigración. Si eres un trabajador de tecnología sindicalizado, organiza a tu sindicato en solidaridad con los trabajadores inmigrantes y comparte tus declaraciones con Tech Workers Coalition. Si no estás afiliado a un sindicato, considera aprovechar este momento para organizarte y empieza a tender lazos con tus compañeros de trabajo—las sesiones de capacitación de EWOC pueden ayudarte a comenzar. En TWC buscamos maneras de organizar eventos y ayudar a desarrollar una movilización renovada de trabajadores de la tecnología en contra de ICE y del estado de seguridad. Considera unirte y participa con nosotros.

No importa que nuestros jefes opten por unirse al ejército de EE. UU., nosotros, como trabajadores de la tecnología, no podemos quedarnos de brazos cruzados y convertirnos en una nueva rama del ejército contra nuestra voluntad. Condenamos la violencia que destruye nuestras comunidades y que afecta a millones de personas en el extranjero, y sabemos que la única manera de ganar es ejercer el poder con nuestras propias manos.

Tech Workers Must Fight the Anti-Immigrant Crackdown and Escalating Authoritarianism

2025-06-16T13:00:00Z

(Read the Spanish version here)

Los Angeles is now a battleground in defense of the right to protest. On June 13th, 2025, the federal government made the unprecedented decision to deploy 700 Marines to Los Angeles, in addition to 4,000 members of the California National Guard, while the LA Mayor issued a curfew in the downtown area, signaling an ultimate attack on basic civil liberties. These repressive actions came after several days of union-led and community-based protests against the escalation of ICE raids throughout the city, which has sought to violently isolate and terrorize the Latino and Angeleno working community at large.

Many of the people targeted by ICE are workers laboring in warehouses, retail stores, and small shops, alongside their families. Many are also community leaders. The head of the California SEIU, David Huerta, was arrested and detained while ICE raided a garment warehouse, and now faces federal charges and possible jail time. This unequivocally represents an attack on organized labor and highlights the close connection between union rights and immigrant rights. In response, there have been SEIU-initiated protests that have taken place around the country, with other unions joining in solidarity. We as tech workers must also do our part.

The appendages of the tech industry extend far beyond the corporate office walls. Across the tech industry’s value chain, there are workers in all corners: Amazon employs hundreds of thousands of warehouse and logistics workers; Uber, Lyft, Instacart, and DoorDash are among just a few companies that rely on gig workers and deliveristas for their services. Not only are these workers subject to miserable conditions, contingent and uncertain employment, and low pay, but they are prime targets of the ICE raids. Regardless of whether workers do manual work or sit at a desk, whether laboring in distribution centers or creating tech infrastructure that facilitates the circulation of commodities, a blow against one worker is a blow against us all.

These attacks on immigrants are an attack on labor, and all workers. Tech workers, in particular, are caught in this web in extremely precarious ways. Not only are gig-workers and others in the app economy targeted, but the administration has also indicated its desire to attack H-1B workers, who are also widely employed by Silicon Valley titans. In March, TWC held a panel “Immigrant Rights are Labor Rights – Tech Workers and H-1B Visas” where such workers discussed how to connect their concerns to unionizing and organizing. In white-collar tech work, as much as manufacturing, right-wing nativists try to paint immigrants as competing with native-born workers for jobs. In doing so, they’re doing the boss’s work by dividing the working class, trying to displace blame for layoffs or slashed benefits from the profiteers who exploit us, and onto our fellow workers. To build the solidarity necessary for unionization and mass organizing, standing with immigrant and foreign workers is not an optional addition to our labor organizing, but structurally necessary in the minimum viable core.

We are no strangers to fighting back. In 2018, during Trump’s first term, the bosses of the big tech companies expressed a concern for immigrant rights, and adopted, at least verbally, an oppositional stance to the Trump administration. A number of CTOs and CEOs signed the “never again pledge.” Tech workers sought to hold their employers’ feet to the fire to live up to their self-described values. We stood up and opposed their employers’ complicity and willing participation with ICE, with workers from Microsoft to Amazon and beyond demanding “No Tech for ICE.” The Tech Workers Coalition helped to organize Tech Won’t Build It workshops and events, spreading the message even to workers at private tech companies such as Palantir.

As Trump and DOGE privatize government functions and slash government jobs, the administration has been relying even more heavily on Palantir to compile databases and surveillance data, especially to target immigrant workers. The attacks on immigrant rights and those who defend them are an exercise in social control that Palantir’s founders sell as their vision for the future and as the centrality of their services to the American state. This is not new: the militarization of the tech industry and its connections to violence on vulnerable populations have a deep history. Right at its military origins, the internet was always intended as a tool for spying. Since then, with continued government support and funding, the tech industry has poured billions into creating robust military tech, deployed from battlefields to drones used at borders and protests to scraping all of our inboxes.

Today, compelled by a combination of the end of cheap credit and the threat of growing unionization, including of tech workers, tech executives have more fulsomely embraced the far-right rhetoric of the Trump administration. Just recently, four executives from major companies have been enrolled as lieutenant colonels in the military reserve. Today in 2025, we face circumstances that are perhaps worse than 2018, but also with fewer illusions. Now ex-Palantir employees are among those opposing this new round of outsourced spying and repression. Workers with No Tech for Apartheid (NOTA) and TWC members are also supporting actions in various cities to fight against the deportation machine that demolishes the safety of various communities vulnerable to criminalization.

Tech workers are still largely unorganized, but our labor is fundamental to the functioning of modern society and the state. Those who do the work must have a voice in how it is used — tech workers are not mere pawns in some abstract-cartoonishly-evil system, but humans with the agency to take ownership over what results from our labor. By virtue of doing the work, we have the leverage to compel change. We must leverage our power to act in solidarity with the immigrant community, immigrant organizations, and the SEIU to demand an end to the deportations and raids, as well as ICE, National Guard and Marines out of our cities, and that all charges be dropped against Huerta and all protesters. This new offensive is another salvo in Trump’s campaign against the rights and living standards of the entire class. During the Biden administration, even as deportations and ICE crackdowns continued, the tech worker protest movement fell back, as it often does under Democrats. We need to relearn past lessons, and develop new practices and tactics.

Tech workers will continue to join protests, and with effort, we must begin to do so in organized contingents. (Here are some TWC signs that can be printed and used). Those of us already in unions must seek to exert pressure within these institutions to take action in solidarity with immigrants. But we also need to determine how to incorporate these issues into our coworker-to-coworker organizing, and consider how even minority actions within our workplaces may exert pressure on our bosses. We must think more strategically about who has power, and who really controls the output of our work, and how it is possible to shift the balances of power and control. To do this, we must be committed to our organizing, in mapping out decision-makers at our workplace, in identifying chokepoints in the supply chain, and in moving our coworkers to come with us and leverage collective power to end these atrocities.

The Amazon Labor Union - IBT Local 1 published an Immigrant Solidarity Official Statement with a list of demands on Amazon and pledging union response to immigration-related incidents. If you are a unionized tech worker, organize for solidarity with immigrant workers, and pass statements along to the Tech Workers Coalition. If you are not in a union, consider using this moment as an organizing issue, and begin to connect with fellow coworkers — trainings from EWOC can help get things started. We in TWC are looking for ways to hold events and help develop a renewed mobilization of tech workers against ICE and the security state — consider joining up and getting involved.

While our bosses may be choosing to join the US Army, we as tech workers cannot lie down and become a new branch of the military against our will. We condemn the violence destroying our communities and inflicted on millions abroad, and we know that the only way to win is to take back power into our own hands.

Games Developer Conference 2025: Shaders and Solidarity

2025-04-20T11:14:00Z

This year, over three days in late March, four members of TWC Bay Area attended the Game Developer Conference (GDC). Every year, GDC brings over 30,000 workers in the videogame industry to San Francsico to showcase the latest innovations and lead industry talks. We were there to observe and learn about organizing in the videogame industry, through worker-led panels and Communication Workers of America (CWA) organizers. CWA’s presence at GDC included over fifty organizers, a booth stuffed with zines and buttons, three panels, and a big announcement.

The news: every game worker in the US and Canada can now join United Videogame Workers, a direct-join, industry-wide union.

Game studios, like tech companies and startups, vary in size. It’s not uncommon for a small studio to shut down before a union campaign succeeds, and for bosses to shut down a studio and lay off all of the workers after a game is released. The direct-join union is one way for workers to stand together, whether they work at a big-name studio with hundreds of millions in budget, an indie co-op, are a contractor, or are laid off.

The union launched at a panel on Wednesday, March 19th, with workers and full-time organizers sharing their experiences in union campaigns in individual studios. After the talk, we chanted and marched down a set of escalators, through the convention hall, and into Yerba Buena Gardens. Through our march and a series of speeches outside, we let other game workers know there was a union in town. One call and response went:

“Does your boss know how to write a game design doc?” / “No!”
“Who does?” / “We do!”

“Does your boss know how to write a shader” / “No!”
“Who does?” / “We do!”

(Game design documents describe the world of the game, the characters’ values, and the mechanics of player interactions. It’s a collaboration between artists and developers without which a game would not exist. Shaders are graphics programs that run on a GPU, and require deep technical knowledge.)

Amid the cheers of the crowd, there were also sheepish admissions of the difficulty of writing a shader.

In a panel on Friday March 21st, workers that won unions and contracts walked us through their campaigns. Organizing committee members described the anxiety of early 1:1s, of asking people they didn’t know to call on their personal phones or meet by the elevator, and how after some practice, these conversations became easier. Turns out most coworkers were open to some form of collective action, and even those that were initially anti-union appreciated that folks were doing something. Remote organizing wasn’t necessarily harder, it just came with its own set of pros and cons. Discord servers served as off-site gathering places.

In the US, employers are required to negotiate any layoffs with the union, even before a formal contract. In the panel, workers spoke proudly about how they were able to save contractor jobs from being cut just weeks after they won their election. On top of protections from layoffs and a requirement that workers evaluate any new AI tools before adopting them, one hard-won contract included coverage for dental braces. Braces are almost never covered by dental benefits, showing the kinds of unexpected but necessary things workers can win when they stand together.

The overall feeling in the room was of inspiration - that the successful union campaigns at Microsoft-owned Blizzard, at the indie studio Tender Claws, and at Google and Kickstarter are all evidence that across the game and tech industries, workers are winning.

Outside of the panels and conversations with CWA organizers, we explored the Expo Hall and attended a handful of other talks. ctrl+alt+GDC - the part of the Expo Hall floor dedicated to experimental user interfaces - was filled with builds akin to interactive art installations. We learned that seesaws, knitting needles, and showers can be game controllers. In a talk on games research, one researcher measured the degree to which non-heterosexual folks feel represented by the romantic relationship options in games like Baldur’s Gate 3 - it’s better than it used to be, but not perfect. Another researcher shared how they used decolonial theory to build a game that honored Chilean indigenous history.

As we reflect on our first GDC, we’re excited to continue building coalitions and connecting with United Videogame Workers and other unions. We have a lot in common with videogame workers. We are honored to stand with them at the launch of their union, to learn from their organizing, and to be energized by their effort. The mid-week rally inspired us to think more about our presence and signage at this year’s May Day march, the history of the movement, and how we can continue to stand in solidarity with all workers.

Immigrant Rights are Labor Rights – Tech Workers and H-1B Visas

2025-03-14T12:00:00Z

In the weeks preceding Trump’s inauguration, the right-wing coalition supporting him entered into a fractious debate over skilled immigrant workers. On one side stood tech executives who value immigrant labor as a means to increase profits and productivity. On the other were pure reactionary white supremacist nativists stoking fears about minority workers taking “our American jobs”. Neither side was savory, and nowhere were the voices of tech workers, and especially immigrant tech workers, represented. As a first response, Tech Workers Coalition (TWC) assembled a panel of workers who were or had been on H-1B visas, to represent our experiences and views. We wanted to give voice to those at the heart of the debate, and also develop a strategy and message on how and why we must respond as part of an international working class.

We felt this was especially urgent for two reasons. First, there are fake, astroturfed far-right organizations (such as “U.S. Tech Workers”) that claim to speak for tech workers, but are in reality just propped up and run by anti-immigrant forces with no discernible constituency of actual tech workers. Second, even people who are looked to as progressive voices who advocate for workers, such as Bernie Sanders, have given credence to nativist protectionism as somehow “anti-corporate”. In a similar vein, the UAW recently put out a statement supporting tariffs.

The H-1B visa is a dual-intent, guestworker visa granted to foreign nationals hired by U.S. employers to work in a specialty occupation. More than half of H-1B visa holders work in the tech industry. Dual intent means that it is one of the few visas that can lead to a green card and citizenship. However, there are many hurdles involved in actually making it to that point. Typically, in order to get to the stage of receiving an employer-sponsored green card, a worker has to complete 6 years on the H-1B, going through a renewal process at the 3 year mark. At any point over these 6 years, the worker’s position can be terminated by the company, destroying the prospect of reaching the green card stage, unless the worker can find a new employer willing to hire and sponsor them within 60 days of the termination. With mass layoffs continuing for years in tech, securing a new job prospect with visa or green card benefits in 60 days is close to impossible.

Since assuming office, the Trump administration has embarked on all-sided attacks – federal workers and services, immigration and border controls, tariff threats, renewed trade-war with China, threatening to annex Greenland and perhaps Canada, destroying workers rights, declaring intent to seize Gaza, and so forth. The H-1B debate, barely a month old, seems a lifetime ago. But, not only will it return, it also gets to the heart of many issues we face in our organizing more generally – how the bosses and politicians will sow division among workers, and how to build solidarity in the face of that. The overarching theme of the panel was that indeed the bosses seek to specially exploit and drive down conditions for workers through their mistreatment of H-1B workers – however the answer is not to turn on one another, but organize together. We answer with more solidarity, not less.

Indeed, the panel opened with a “big picture” discussion of why and how migration into the U.S. became so significant. The U.S. involvement in the destabilization of the global south through coups, wars, and sanctions drives down conditions throughout the world, creating a pool of migrants who find their movement restricted even as capital flows freely. One worker described: “So while migration is a consequence of capitalism, what we are experiencing is a scapegoating of immigrants. The response should be that we need to see ourselves as an international working class, regardless of citizenship or country of origin.” They contrasted high CEO salaries and corporate profits to the blame placed on exploited immigrant workers for conditions in the U.S. economy. “If all of the immigrants were gone tomorrow, it wouldn’t mean higher wages or better healthcare… the working class struggle has to be international because the capitalist system is global.”

A running theme that emerged was the complex relationship immigrant workers had to the visa system – at once giving them opportunities to work and develop a life in a new country, but at the same time with the employer-sponsored nature of H-1Bs subjecting them to intense indentured-servitude like control of their employers. One worker described: “Before I had the language or the political education to understand the immigration system, I was experiencing how much control my employer had over me… I realized staying in the U.S. was a matter of staying at the job – I felt stuck.” Another described waiting for more than four months between jobs because they had to wait for the visa to transfer. There were descriptions of lies and deceptions from employers – refusals to sponsor promised green cards, layoffs halfway through green card processes, forcing them to start over again and again.

Not only is switching employers difficult for H-1B workers, but also even the act of switching job titles – any shift at all requires changing the green card application, and processing fees on top. Workers who had been involved in unionizing efforts described the double fear they felt – illegal retaliation from an employer could force them to leave the country, with justice coming years later, if ever.

One worker who unionized with the New York Times Tech Guild described: “The whole immigration process sometimes makes me feel like I’m a second class citizen. You pay taxes, but can’t say how the money is used. You feel scared to speak up if your employer or sponsor is doing something wrong. But also, there’s a weird duality… because I also feel very grateful for the corporate overlords for giving this to me, and at the same time, they can easily decide one day to just take it away. That’s what pushed me to start organizing and connecting with my fellow workers: at the end of the day, they will be there for you, not the employers that signed a piece of paper.”

Another worker described how empowering it was when they began to unionize in the nonprofit where they worked: “Even before you have a contract, which takes a while to negotiate, you become no longer an at-will employee. You can’t be fired for no reason – and this matters to H-1Bs where the stakes are higher. Once you have a union, you negotiate discipline at the bargaining table – it can’t be arbitrary. And the same with layoffs, even before the first contract… and with a contract, you can negotiate for more. The things that benefit H-1B workers benefit all workers.” They shared a Labor Notes article with further suggestions for contract language codifying immigrant worker protections.

The effects of organizing described by panelists weren’t just in legal and contractual protections gained, but the transformation of their whole relationship to work and their coworkers: “You can have all these rights, but if the power dynamic stays the same you can’t enforce them. When you have a union, you become less scared to speak up.” No longer do individuals have to be brave and outspoken to push back alone – with an organization they can act together in solidarity. “It’s really hard to unionize, that’s why I talk about it a lot.”

At this workplace, somewhat uniquely, the organizing campaign developed directly out of immigrant visa issues – one worker faced a delay on their green card papers from the employer. Other workers, fearing the same, began to talk about how to collectively respond. From that single issue, other conversations developed about being overworked and underpaid, moving to issues that affected all workers, not just visa-holders. “It just grew from there to doing a union drive, after a lot of conversations.”

Another important theme throughout the discussion was how isolating it is to have visa issues and feeling unable or ashamed to discuss them with coworkers – and how transformative it can be to open that conversation. One worker described how their union drive organized an immigration teach-in to educate their American born coworkers, and how they related to the process of learning to care about issues that don’t seem to be yours alone: “I try, the same way, to urge myself to care about issues that don’t seem connected to me. Like hotel workers strikes. It’s amazing how your friends will reflexively side with the ruling class. Oh, that strike will be so inconvenient for me. You can start to talk to them about it, to think that the labor fight is my fight too.”

These barriers to solidarity occur not just between workers of different national backgrounds, or industries, but within immigrant communities as well. One worker described how many racist and anti-immigrant comments they read in Chinese social media: “In all immigrant communities, we are often very into competition and meritocracy. We’re all scrambling for limited visas, which pushes this competitive mindset…. If we’re not standing together, we cannot fight for something better.”

The final portion of the discussion went in-depth into the recent eight-day strike of the New York Times Tech Guild in November 2024, and how organizing to beat the bosses required a labor movement firmly fighting for immigrant workers. The Guild represents over 600 tech workers at the New York Times, and its strike was the first major tech-specific strike in the U.S. It resulted in the first contract for the union, which began organizing in 2018 – underlining that labor organizing, while well worth it, takes time to develop. After over two years of bargaining, and facing a hostile employer who gave ridiculous counter-offers and delay after delay, the bargaining committee organized a strike authorization vote for a strike during election week – when traffic to the Times site would be at its highest. She described how “we quickly realized there was a group of people vulnerable to retaliation – those on visas, and especially employer-sponsored visas.”

She went on: “The main thing we needed to lean on was the power of solidarity. We would highlight that immigrant workers, visa workers, have the same workers rights – to go on strike, to unionize.” But for immigrant workers, when these rights are violated, the consequences are more dangerous: “… for workers on visas … these processes for righting these wrongs take forever, and immigrant workers don’t have forever. The most important thing was that workers were willing, immigrant and citizen, to stand together in the face of relation. Our numbers were the thing that protected us.”

During the organizing campaign, they had a public letter from the organizing committee with dozens of names – all promising to stop work or take action if any member was retaliated against. They used it with hesitating coworkers to show them who had their back. “To see a principal engineer would walk out for me, an associate engineer who came from community college, made a difference … made me want to put my name out there too.” They also held special meetings for workers on visas to answer questions and address legal risks – giving a space to learn rights and answer hard questions together.

The solidarity and outreach worked – it ensured that H-1B workers were not cowed by the bosses, and stood shoulder-to-shoulder with other, less vulnerable, workers as they embarked on their strike. “Especially given the oncoming political climate, it’s more important than ever to stand with your coworkers because those are the people that will protect you and stand with you. The most surefire thing that you have at your back is one of your coworkers. That is what I have kept in mind as we went through the union and strike. Obviously, when I went on strike, it made me nervous. If I got fired, given the state of things, I didn’t know if I was going to find another job. I’m in the 4th year… I’m on the H-1B extension, so it would be over for me. There was a lot of tension, but how am I going to look at myself in the mirror and not stand up for my coworkers when they would stand up for me? A strike is a sacrifice. Everyday feels like a risk when you’re on a visa. If I’m going to risk it all, I’m going to risk it all for people who would do the same for me.”

As the panel came to a close, one speaker emphasized that the issue of immigrant labor is not primarily H-1B workers. The majority of immigrant workers are under visas that are not dual-intent and offer no path to citizenship, or lack papers altogether. We need to bear that in mind and fight for them as well. Another concluded with advice to start with just a single conversation, and open up about issues and challenges. Building on that, another noted : “… when you do that, the problems people think are individual are not. The problems you think are unique to your team are on other teams. The problems you think are specific to your company happen across companies. You start to see things differently. In our case, everyone thought it was just them. Changing that can build solidarity. It starts to break down walls.”

Finally, as the moderator of the panel noted, when the H-1B debate re-emerges into the national spotlight, we should bear in mind not only how we respond as individual workers, but what political demands we can raise to counter the anti-immigrant political demands of the right. Since they make the populist claim that their issue with H-1Bs is how they empower employers against workers – then we should demand that the visas be changed to be better for workers, not restricted. For example – extending the grace period after job loss from 60 days to a full year, putting all immigrant visas (including agricultural) on a path to citizenship, removing the requirement of continued employer-sponsorship from the visas once granted. One simple act discussed could simply be to extend the registry date. This is the date such that if any U.S. resident, regardless of status, has resided in the U.S. since, they may apply for legal permanent resident status. The current registry date was set in 1986 to 1972. Advancing it as a one-time act would be a huge win for immigrant and workers rights in the U.S., and setting a precedent or law to advance it continuously even more so.

A new Logo for the Tech Workers Coalition

2024-06-13T04:00:00Z

Yeah, that’s right. Tech Workers Coalition is undergoing a restyling and the new logo is just the first step. If you participate in our international Slack server, you probably already know that TWC Global has been working on a new logo. Maybe you even participated in the co-design activities. TWC Global, as the international digital chapter that takes care, among many other things, of the digital infrastructure and the social media communication started a few months ago a work group in charge of updating our visual identity, building on top of the input from the organizers and the broader community. The first result is in front of you.

Mia Casesa, an active member of TWC Global, is the designer that did the heavy-lifting of organizing the co-design activities and ultimately worked on the production of the logo. Let’s hear, directly from her, a comment about the new logo:

For the new logo, I wanted to capture a sense of movement, connectivity and technology all rolled into a unifying emblem that could also pay homage to the history and legacy of labor. The many differing roles and groups an organization like TWC represents were a challenge to bring together initially, but also represented an opportunity to capture that evolving dynamic into a visual medium, and distill the essence of those concepts into a cohesive brand identity.

This result was achieved, among other activities, through the collection of input from our community in the form of five adjectives that represent TWC. We clustered them and then produced a single statement that informed what we wanted to get from this new visual identity.

Here’s the statement: “TWC is an international group of Tech Workers who are building class consciousness and political awareness among Tech Workers to challenge the harms of the Tech industry by building a movement rooted in community and solidarity.”

We believe the new logo was a necessary step for the growth of TWC. It better conveys our relationship to labor, while at the same time conveying clearly that we operate in the space of digital technology. It also serves a more practical function: the old logo couldn’t really incorporate the name of local chapters, while the new one is much more adaptable.

We would like to take the chance of this update to look back at the proliferation of TWC logos that emerged in our first 10+ years of activity.

Let’s start with the current logo. Introduced in 2016, it represented TWC around the world until today, either in its Black/Red, Green/Blue or Black version.

Before that, our website sported a yellow on green logotype, which probably not many of you will remember.

The current logo also gave birth to several local adaptations that enriched the basic idea with slogans and chapter names.

The Italian chapter, born in 2020, went its own way, producing a completely separate logo for its national and city-level chapters.

A year later, they also embraced the “tech-monkey” symbol, formally not a TWC-related symbol but a broader tech workers symbol that the Italian chapter occasionally used on flyers and flags.

We conclude this tour with some logos that we could call “non-standard”.

TWC Rome alt logo, with the Lupa, the Coliseum, and the rice supplì and the purple/yellow colors of the Immortal City.

TWC Austin logo, a city apparently living in a permanent Halloween season.

Here a… TWC/Extinction Rebellion cross-over?

If you’re interested in joining TWC’s community, join our Slack through this form. If you want to start organizing your workplace or join a local or global chapter, consider to fill our on-boarding questionnaire.

Highlights of the Labor Notes 2023 Tech Organizing Conference

2024-02-02T05:00:00Z

As the Labor Notes 2023 Tech Organizing Conference came to a close, it became clear that the Tech Workers Movement is bigger and healthier than ever. The gathering, held in New York on the 7th of October, brought together a diverse group of tech labor organizers from all across the United States.

Some of us in the Tech Workers Coalition wanted to give the opportunity to participants to share their experiences and insights. So we prepared a short survey to collect experiences from attendees. We then selected the most interesting quotes from the respondents and grouped them according to the themes that attracted the most interest.

The Tech Workers Movement is Bigger Than We Thought

The dominant theme in the survey responses is the realization that the tech workers movement is far more expansive and impactful than many attendees imagined. Tech workers from various backgrounds are coming together, united by a shared goal: to challenge the status quo and advocate for better working conditions, fair treatment, and ethical practices within the industry.

If some years ago the tech workers movement was symbolized by huge crowds of Google employees protesting in the streets, it’s clear that the recent past has seen the momentum shifting to more focused forms of conflict. Now, tech workers successfully forming unions in their workplace make the headlines on a daily basis.

TechCon2023 was a chance to observe the results of such growth, with rooms filled by tech organizers from all over. Such a scenario would have been unthinkable only five years ago.

Let’s read what the attendees had to say about this:

The conference helped me understand the size and momentum of the movement. As someone who works in a company without any current organizing, it was inspiring to talk to and learn from organizers who started, at or are currently in, the same position as me. There seems to be more organizing going on everyday!

A Software Engineer from Seattle

Seeing so many groups come together, it was easier to see what issues we all faced in common in our organizing. I already knew remote organizing was something we especially face as a challenge in this sector. But it was striking to see so many people grapple with issues surrounding multinational and cross-border organizing, as well as various sorts of contract and sub-contract arrangements.

I was impressed by the range of workers and industries represented, not only among public campaigns, but more broadly. It became clear to me that the initial wave of organizing had raised the idea of tech unions and labor consciousness to a whole new layer of people, and there’s a whole group of potential organizers and activists ready to step up.

Gary

The tech worker movement is much larger than I thought. Many tech workers are organizing independently of established legal frameworks, but many are also intimately aware/closely watching legal changes for example on joint-employer liability and employee classification.

Internationalism: A Global Movement

Yonatan Miller

Another significant aspect is the international nature of the Tech Workers Movement. The challenges faced by tech workers extend beyond national borders, and the fight for workers’ rights is a global endeavor. From solidarity actions to cross-border collaborations, tech workers are forging connections and building alliances to effect change on a global scale.

We always knew that the tech industry moves smoothly across borders, and we always knew we would have to confront this reality. Now, this abstract concern has turned into a concrete problem that needs to be addressed.

This was very clear to people who responded to the survey:

Due to the stakes of climate change, it’s necessary but not sufficient for organizing to be done locally. We need to coordinate internationally and quickly which often means working around the legal labor structures in place rather than going through them. Basically, we can’t wait for the law to catch up, we have to organize regardless of legal support. I hadn’t heard of Game Workers Unite or Apple Together before but it seems they are already doing this kind of organizing which is amazing.

Anastacio

The discussion of how corporations structure work across nation states borders was sobering. That corporations can relocate work to the opposite side of the world, to avoid traditional labor organizing, to create barriers among workers, and to stifle more left organizing (such as anti-militarism organizing), was really sobering. It makes me understand how important internationalism is in our work.

Diversity of Tactics: Beyond Traditional Union Organizing

Anonymous

The survey responses also shed light on the interest for the diverse range of tactics employed by tech workers to advocate for their rights. While traditional union organizing remains a crucial strategy, tech workers are also exploring new approaches and leveraging their unique skills to make an impact.

Playing with the full deck of cards and opening multiple fronts at once is inevitable when the challenges we face are complex and multi-faceted.

This attitude emerges from several answers we received:

The recognition of the power we’re up against really hit home for me. The tech corporations just have so much power: to move work around, to lay off workers, even to change ownership structures. It really reinforced for me how we need a wide variety of strategies; expecting the legal system to work for us just isn’t going to get us where we need to go. It’s one strategy, but it’s a pretty weak one relative to the power of these corporations.

Ike McCreery, former Senior Site Reliability Engineer, Google

I learned that much successful union organizing in big companies has come from combining efforts in various internal areas: Climate justice, response to sexual assault, bread-and-butter pay issues, contractor conditions, etc. Essentially combining different worker organizing cores within the company, even if they were not started as union campaigns.

A Software Engineer from Seattle

I was surprised to see how many attendees cared not just about workplace organizing but all sorts of causes from climate change to anti-imperialism. It seems like people already understand the connections between different types of organizing but might not yet know how to combine them. I don’t have the answers yet either but it is hopeful to see people already talking about new types of organizing.

Anastacio

If you liked this article, probably it’s time for you to get involved and connect with other tech workers like yourself, organizing for power in our industry.

Subscribe to our slack and listserv.

No Tech for Apartheid

2023-11-17T05:00:00Z

No Tech for Apartheid: Call to Action

On Wednesday, November 8 2023, the New York Times reported that tech workers are facing retaliation and discrimination for speaking up about Palestine. Google workers have published an open letter describing some of the retaliation they’ve been experiencing. And just last week, we learned of a tech worker Mai Ubeid’s death in Gaza following a recent Israeli airstrike. In this moment of grief, rage, and fear, we call on our community to take action to hold our leadership accountable. If you’re here to take action, jump to “What can I do?”.

“What can I do?”

It is so easy to fall into despair and feel hopeless. But if we take action together, collectively workers have the power to change this situation. Here are five immediate action items you can take:

Organize: Join the No Tech For Apartheid campaign. Join our upcoming mass calls to meet each other and learn about upcoming actions:
- Thursday, 12/7, 8 p.m. ET / 5 p.m. PT: Register
Outreach: Message your coworkers in your team, org, and ERGs to get them involved too, so we can build a movement that’s ready for this moment. Check out some template communications we have below.
Mobilize: When our leadership refuses to acknowledge how tech workers are impacted by the current crisis, we will honor our colleagues ourselves. Organizing a vigil is an opportunity for us to come together to honor the passing of tech workers like Mai. Pick a date and an entrance to your office where you will gather. To organize a vigil at your office, see bit.ly/VigilHowTo.
Learn: Educate yourself about the current crisis. Bring your coworkers to the many virtual teach-ins that Palestinian groups have been organizing.
- No to APEC, No to Aparthied teach-in (virtual): Tuesday, 11/14, 4 p.m. ET / 1 p.m. ET: Register here
Call Congress: Of course, if you haven’t been doing so already, contact your elected officials to demand that they endorse an immediate and unconditional ceasefire. If you vote in the U.S., call your members of Congress to demand that they endorse an immediate and unconditional ceasefire. Both Jewish Voice for Peace and 5 Calls make it really easy, but you can also contact your representative directly.

“I work in tech and I am so sad, angry, and scared about the current crisis in Gaza, but no one in tech seems to be talking about it.”

You are not alone—we are also sad, angry, scared, and more. As Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim tech workers; as anti-Zionist Jewish tech workers; as tech workers of color with histories of displacement, migration, and diaspora; as engineers and designers who want to build technology for social good; as trust and safety workers who want to keep our technologies safe; and as allied tech workers standing in solidarity, we share your grief, anger, fear, and more.

Workers are beginning to speak up about the atrocities in front of us, and they’re asking tough questions that our leaders are trying to silence and ignore. These workers are facing retaliation and harassment for speaking truth to power. But we are stronger together. Every day we find new voices and connect them with each other, and together we’re forming a chorus that’s crying out for peace. Join us so we can build an industry where people can stand together for human rights.

“Why has leadership in the tech industry been silent on this?”

The tech industry’s silence speaks louder than words. Many tech companies have yet to acknowledge the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Those that did have made one-sided statements that erase the context of apartheid.

The tech industry has a long history of violating Palestinian rights through censorship. Workers are targeted for speaking amidst their employers’ silence, and their employers are standing idly by or providing one-sided enforcement of harassment and discrimination policies. They want to quell any dissent so that we continue to churn out profits for them without complaint, even when tech workers and their families are victims of the militarism they’re enabling. Just last week, we learned of Mai Ubeid’s death following a recent Israeli airstrike. Mai was one of many Palestinian tech workers at Gaza Sky Geeks, a Google-backed co-working space, startup hub, and coding school, who dreamt of creating technology to support the lives of those living with disability.

Our leadership may lack the courage to stand against apartheid, and they may choose to be silent or turn away from this devastation - but we don’t have to make the same choices. We can demand that the industry do more.

“What can Tech do?”

This is a moment of crisis. First and foremost, tech workers must organize to demand their employers cease any defense contracts. Through the No Tech For Apartheid (NOTA) campaign, workers at Google and Amazon are taking bold action demanding the cancelation of Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion dollar contract with the Israeli military and government to build cloud infrastructure for military use. Workers across the tech industry are starting to follow, organizing to demand their companies cease any defense contracts with the Israeli state.

Second, companies must stop propagating Israeli misinformation and censoring Palestinian solidarity content. Our employers have extensive experience protecting freedom of expression, especially that of marginalized and oppressed communities, and ensuring that users have access to verified information.

Third, tech companies must protect the welfare of Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim tech workers, and others speaking out in solidarity against apartheid. Tech companies must start by addressing harassment and discrimination targeted at them in and out of the workplace.

It’s time for tech companies to recognize that the labor they employ have voices, perspectives, and needs that they can no longer ignore. Technology should be used to build a better world, not wreck it, and it’s time for us to call on our employers to build it.

Templates for outreach

[Template] Email to your coworkers, org, ERGs

Dear colleagues,

I just learned that Mai Ubeid, a former tech worker at Google, and her entire family were murdered during a recent Israeli airstrike. I did not know her, but as a fellow tech worker I am heartbroken by the news and can’t help but feel connected to the countless innocent civilians, like Mai, who are being killed, injured, and displaced by the ongoing genocide in Gaza.

The current death toll in Palestine is at 10,500+ and growing, with almost half of the deaths being children. Healthcare facilities are on the brink of collapse—71% of hospitals have shut down due to Israeli airstrikes and bombardment. The humanitarian situation continues to worsen as the state of Israel refuses to facilitate humanitarian corridors into Gaza to provide the needed amounts of aid. And this is not new. The blockade on Gaza, ongoing since 2007, is described by the U.N. as a “denial of basic human rights,” which includes, but is not limited to, a severe shortage of water, food, and medical care. This retaliation against an entire group of people for the acts of a few is defined as “collective punishment,” which is illegal under international law and is considered a war crime. We are witnessing this humanitarian crisis firsthand through social media, but the very companies that facilitate these communications are silent, while our coworkers and their families are dying.

Our company values state [INSERT COMPANY VALUES] . Yet, our leadership has made no acknowledgment of martyred tech workers, the ongoing genocide in Gaza, or its impact on our employee population. It is disheartening to see that our values are not honored when it comes to our Palestinian colleagues.

[IF GOOGLE OR AMAZON] Unfortunately, our employer’s silence on this matter should come as no surprise: Google and Amazon hold a $1.2B contract with Israel through with they directly profit off of this genocidal campaign. This contract, Project Nimbus, provides the Israeli military with an “all encompassing cloud solution” and AI-driven facial recognition, sentiment analysis, and object tracking tools which are likely deployed in the violent policing and surveillance of Palestinians. Despite vocal worker protest, Google and Amazon have thus far refused to cancel Project Nimbus and instead have retaliated against employees who have spoken out. Yet tech workers across the industry have only grown more united in pressuring Google and Amazon to drop Nimbus, and we are convinced that we can succeed, as we did in forcing Google to drop a prior defense contract, Project Maven, in 2018.

I can’t stay silent like our leadership has, and I want to honor the values that our leaders won’t. Please join me in standing up against this genocide by joining the No Tech for Apartheid campaign (www.notechforapartheid.com), which is working to ensure our company and our industry is not complicit. They will be holding a mass call on [INSERT NEXT CALL], for which you can register at bit.ly/NOTACallToAction, which also has other actions you can take.

And finally, thank you for hearing me out and understanding that so many of us are trying to find where we can use our voice for peace - I hope you will too.

Sincerely / In solidarity, [YOUR NAME]

[Template] Chat message to your coworkers, org, ERGs

Hi folks, I just learned that a former tech worker at Google, Mai Ubeid, and her entire family were murdered during a recent Israeli airstrike. I did not know her, but as a fellow tech worker I am heartbroken by the news and can’t help but feel connected to the countless innocent civilians, like Mai, who are being killed, injured, and displaced by the ongoing genocide in Gaza.

The current death toll in Palestine is at 10,000+ and growing, with almost half of the deaths being children. Healthcare facilities are on the brink of collapse and the humanitarian situation continues to worsen.

I can’t stay silent like our leadership has, and I want to honor the values that our leaders won’t. Please join me in standing up against this genocide by joining the No Tech for Apartheid campaign (www.notechforapartheid.com), which is working to ensure our company and our industry is not complicit. They will be holding a mass call on [INSERT NEXT CALL] and bit.ly/NOTACallToAction, which also has other actions you can take.

And finally, thank you for hearing me out and understanding that so many of us are trying to find where we can use our voice for peace - I hope you will too.

Writers to the Front, AI to the Back

2023-06-13T04:00:00Z

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.

The Worker’s Perspective

By L.E. Correia

Hi from the picket lines, I’m L.E. Correia.

In 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.

For 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.

But 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?

I 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?

I 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.

Hang 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.

It 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.

The 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.

Growing 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.

So 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.

Which 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.

It 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.

I 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…

The 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:

The average writer’s ability to pay rent
Rising BIPOC writers getting locked out of the industry
The world beyond their mansion walls, or how on fire it is

Why 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.

By 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.

That’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.

The 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.

While 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.

Thank 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.

Chatbots Can’t Care Like We Do: Helpline Workers Speak Out on World Eating Disorders Action Day

2023-06-02T04:00:00Z

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.

The Worker’s Perspective

By Abbie Harper of Helpline Associates United

I 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.

In 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.

The 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.

NEDA’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.

Under 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.

We 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.

Helpline Associates United Statement for World Eating Disorders Action Day

June 2nd, 2023

Yesterday, the National Eating Disorders Association (NEDA) shut down the helpline that supported the eating disorder community for decades.

We, 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.

We 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.

NEDA 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.”

In 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.

The 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.

NEDA 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.

The 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.

As 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.

The 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.

To those who have felt invisible, we see you.

To those who have felt silenced, we hear you.

To those who have been bullied, we believe you.

To those who have tirelessly advocated for organizational accountability, we stand with you, and believe we need a change.

In celebration of World Eating Disorders Action Day, we urge you to take the following action with us:

We 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:

FEDUP
Nalgona Positivity Pride
Project HEAL
National Alliance for Eating Disorders
ANAD
and other members of the Collaborative of Eating Disorders Organizations

These 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.

After the #EtsyStrike, Crafting a Co-op Alternative

2023-05-30T04:00:00Z

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.

The Worker’s Perspective

By Valerie Schafer Franklin

My 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.

On 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.

It 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.

For 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.

#EtsyStrike and Aftermath

Flash 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.

Etsy 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.

A 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.

It 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.”

After the strike, I had a chance to take a breath and ask, Now what?

Towards 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.

I 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.

Crafting an Artisan-Owned Alternative

I 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.

As 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.

For 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.

I 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.”

But 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.

The 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.

We 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.

Formalizing our Co-op

This 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.

Unlike 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.

Co-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.

Expanding our Membership

This 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.

To 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.

So, 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.

If 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.

With gratitude to TWC for the support, and especially to Tamara Kneese for her contributions to this piece and her past writing on the topic.

Research is a Job that Benefits Businesses First, Users Second

2023-05-02T04:00:00Z

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.

The Worker’s Perspective

by Claire S

I 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.

A 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.

As 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.”

Despite 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.

So, 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.

Part 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.

The 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.

That 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.

So, 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.

Instead, 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?

Frontline 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.

As 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.

I 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.

This 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.

Why Our Union Contract is Stalled at Code for America

2023-04-27T04:00:00Z

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.

The Worker’s Perspective

by Jacky Alciné

I 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.

Days 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.

It’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.

I 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.

So 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.

Two 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.

So, 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.

The 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!

But 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).

After 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.

Follow 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.

Beware the Hype: ChatGPT Didn't Replace Human Data Annotators

2023-04-04T04:00:00Z

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.

The Worker’s Perspective

By Turkopticon

What do you get when you run a quick experiment using the new software tool a whole industry is talking about?

Last 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.

Data 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.

Today, 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.

First, 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.

Second, 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.

Third, 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.

Language 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.

We 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.

Abolish Palo Alto

2023-03-28T04:00:00Z

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.

The Historian’s Perspective

Kristin Sheets interviews Malcolm Harris about “Palo Alto” in a recent book talk.

This 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.

Kristen Sheets:

Thanks 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.

Malcolm Harris:

That’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.

At 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.”

We 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.

When 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.

He 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.

We 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.

Kristen Sheets:

You 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.

Malcolm Harris:

I 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.

There’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.

The 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.

The 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.

I 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?

Why 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.

Kristen Sheets:

One 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.

Malcolm Harris:

The 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.

If 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.

The 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.

I 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.”

He 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.

Kristen Sheets:

One 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.

Malcolm Harris:

There’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.

That’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.

We 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.

She 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.

Blowing the Whistle on TikTok Content Moderation

2023-03-22T04:00:00Z

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.

The Worker’s Perspective

by a TikTok content moderator

I’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.

Doing 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.

Working 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.

I 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.

Many 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.

Perhaps 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.

It 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.

Nonetheless, 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.

As 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.

Also, 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.

I 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.

Layoffs? Come to Italy, We'll Teach You How to Fight

2023-03-07T05:00:00Z

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.

The Worker’s Perspective

A conversation with Laura, a worker at SaGa Coffee Factory

English version:

Gaggio 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.

In 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: “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.)

Given 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.

☕

The 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?

We, 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.

The 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.

What was it like, on a psychological and personal level, to experience this change?

At 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.

Then 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.

Living 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?

Before 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.

The 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.

We 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.

I 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.

The 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.”

Is 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?

What 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.

When 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.

I 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.

I 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.

If you do nothing, you get nothing.

Protesta delle lavoratrici della SaGa / Source

Italian version

Gaggio 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.

Nei 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: “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”.

Vista 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.

☕

La 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?

Noi 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.

Il 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 è 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.

Com’è stato, a livello psicologico e personale, vivere questo cambiamento?

All’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.

Poi 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.

Vivere 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?

Prima 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 costruire il presidio, abbiamo molte ricevuto molte più iscrizioni: praticamente tutti hanno fatto la tessera.

Anche 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.

Non 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.

Porto 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.

I 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 di lottare per 100 giorni”.

Il 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?

Quello 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.

Quando ho fatto quella dichiarazione non pensavo che avrei fatto così clamore. Mi è uscito spontaneamente, senza pensarci troppo.

So 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.

In 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.

Se non fai niente, non ottieni niente.

Who’s Cleaning Twitter?

2023-02-28T05:00:00Z

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 newsletter@techworkerscoalition.org.

The Worker’s Perspective

On behalf of the fired Twitter cleaners of 32BJ SEIU in NYC and SEIU Local 87 in San Francisco

Twitter is a mess lately.

In 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.

So, who’s cleaning Twitter these days? It’s not the unionized workers of 32BJ SEIU in NYC and SEIU Local 87 in San Francisco.

“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.”

Merita 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.

“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?”

Both 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.

So, fired cleaners demanding their union jobs back need info about the new cleaning company that Twitter contracted to replace them. Send tips to newsletter@techworkerscoalition.org.

“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.”

In 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.”

While 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.”

Julio Alvarado, another fired janitor, was told that he’d be replaced by robots. “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.”

“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.

In closing out her speech to the fired up community of supporters and workers, Juana Laura, another fired janitor, reminds us:

“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.”

“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.”

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.

Announcements

Research the Life & Legacy of Robert Benner

Marceline 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!

Events

“Palo Alto” book talk, this Thursday

Come learn about Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and The World. RSVP at https://bit.ly/twcpaloalto. Can’t wait? Can’t make the time? Watch the 2min book trailer or listen to this 45min interview.

It’s Not Science, Just Surveillance (and it's Under Your Desk)

2022-11-29T05:00:00Z

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.

The Worker’s Perspective

By Max von Hippel

On 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.

The 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.

So, we – Northeastern students and faculty – wrote a letter to David and to Northeastern’s President Joseph E. Aoun requesting the sensors be removed, noting:

they serve no scientific purpose
they are intimidating
they change our behaviors (students don’t want to be surveilled thus do not use their desks) so the data is flawed
the university chose not to go through IRB, the federally mandated Institutional Review Board that signs off on ethics for research
indeed, David didn’t even bother to ask the IRB folks if this was something for which he’d need IRB approval
being surveilled is creepy and unnecessary
and so on.

The 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.”

Obviously, we contest the use of the word "give.”

Anyway, 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.

Then 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.

In 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?

Subsequently, 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.

Below 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.

Another 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:

I’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.

Some highlights from the notes:

David mis-genders a student
Student: who are we monitoring if not people. David: Any heat source.
From @eysasaur, “Another meeting highlight was when someone pointed out the cost of these devices were more than graduate students make in a year and Luzzi thought it’d be a good idea to compare other costs in terms of ~how many PhD stipends is this~”
Another student commented: "My favorite part from the notes is when a student complained about wireless interference from the sensors ruining their experiment, and Luzzi said that there was a facility in Burlington (which is a 4 hour drive from Boston!), and then said “Stuff like this happens, this is maybe a first experience for you but it is not for me.” Like, yeah, it happened because of you!

As is often the case, some conversation about this whole mess can be found on Reddit, here.

But in the final round, we won. Luzzi wrote to concede:

Nevertheless, 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.

This 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.

Thank you to TWC for amplifying our organizing.