The current tech organizing playbook is to try to do something at work, get your hand swatted by management, then go crying to sympathetic journalists. If someone gets fired, the next step is either taking a payoff with NDA, or writing a strongly-worded letter to the NLRB
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It's a college student mentality, where the way to succeed is performative protest eventually leading to administrative redress of grievances. These employees identify so deeply with their company that an effective, adversarial approach to using their latent power is unimaginable
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I've said it a lot, but it would only take about 100 employees to shut down large parts of Google. How this threat was defused by shunting employee anger into harmless channels, including a cosplay "union" whose sole achievement was a NYT op-ed, is a fascinating object lesson
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The chief obstacle to effective workplace organizing in tech is the psychological threat it poses to employees, whose sense of identity is so intimately rooted in their work that they are unable to make the smallest use of their latent power. Steelworkers wouldn't be so neurotic.
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The best imaginable outcome in many tech organizers' eyes is a favorable NLRB ruling, or in other words, finding an ever-higher manager to file a grievance with. The world the NLRB originated in—workers advancing goals independent of what their bosses want—is conceptually alien.
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The most likely outcome of tech workers at Apple being too inert to even create their own Slack instance (it's free!) is that it will doom the dad jokes and fun dogs slack channels at the company, while affecting pay disparities not a whit.pic.twitter.com/IlBvPjLmnx
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Pinboard Retweeted Josh Eidelson
Like, this dude is a Stanford grad and worked in Google's mobile advertising division (!) for two years, but in an NLRB hearing today explained how he was shocked, shocked when the third largest company in the world behaved like a corporationhttps://twitter.com/josheidelson/status/1432754521592061953 …
Pinboard added,
Josh EidelsonVerified account @josheidelson"The phrase 'Don’t Be Evil,' it’s a big part of what Google stands for in my mind and–before the recent past couple years–a big part of what I understood Google to be about," ex-employee Wyatt Liang-Ratliff testified. It "meant that it’s not like the rest of corporate America"Show this thread5 replies 10 retweets 86 likesShow this thread -
There were even people like this at Yahoo, back in the day when it was run by a tanned Hollywood CEO who I'm not sure had ever used a computer. They would tell you in full sincerity they "bled purple" and were committed to changing the world through whatever it was Yahoo did
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This is what I mean by "there's no IQ limit on stupid". The most frightfully intelligent people can be dumb as rocks about the broader implications of their work, and via selection effect that is the kind of employee who mainly fills the ranks of Big Tech. Good luck organizing!
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Replying to @Pinboard
STEM students in university who don’t come out to support student protests because “it’s silly”.
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Well, they're likely right about that.
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Replying to @Pinboard
They can also be frightfully ignorant about the broader implications of “silly.”
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