They’re still in Kurian’s office, still streaming, and starting to get major media coverage: WaPo Wired
In my opinion this is one of the most important labor developments in the US in a while. Internationally politicized worker organization in the belly of the beast by traditionally un-unionizable PMCs.
e: finally arrested after 10 hours
Yeah there’s real challenges and not much has happened since Maven. I think that tech worker organizing is eventually going to get easier as we get proletarianized, but for now it’s largely an uphill battle.
To me, the most interesting part is the framing of this almost as worker control over the direction and organization of work. That’s something that unions largely were forced to cede in the 20th century. Sure the pay and hours are good but they’re saying that you know, I don’t want to work on genocide, it’s a mental health problem, a workplace dignity issue, etc. We’re highly-skilled, highly-paid professionals: why should we do the stupid, awful shit Product wants us to do and not say anything about what we want to build? Hard to do this without downplaying Palestinian experience, but to some level they’re emphasizing the individual worker demands and not just running on sympathy for other people.
I do agree it’s tricky to calibrate demands and so far workplaces have largely been shooting for the moon instead of building momentum with small wins. Need to make demands that are achievable but still meaningful, not so small as to be reformist. Transitional program can be a guide for that.
Yea, I think where it falls a bit short is that it’s hard to get people on your side without also supporting and caring for the workers’ other grievances like layoffs, benefits being cut, performance pressures, etc.
It’s very similar to the PSL style of organizing where they hold big protests largely on social issues but they don’t actually try to connect with the local communities and help them out materially. So they’re capturing the support and attention of a lot of the advanced but do nothing for the moderate
Mhm. I’m not sure what the Alphabet union’s line was, but they don’t seem to have gotten very far. A lot of this is bootstrapping - can’t make real material gains until you have enough workers on board, can’t get enough workers on board without real material gains. So I’m sympathetic to the arguments for unit level organization.
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Having talked to a lot of co-workers about Google’s tech being used to cause harm, the huge majority sentiment I’ve gotten is that workers don’t actually care what they build. They just wanna get the money and climb the career ladder unfortunately
They’ve also displayed a lot of libertarian free market sentiment of they don’t actually hold any social responsibility for what they’ve built, and that it’s only the fault of the people using Google’s tech to do bad things
I might work with weirdos but my (non-Google) tech coworkers have been generally receptive and don’t want to build actively harmful/misleading/buggy stuff. It’s kind of a natural outgrowth of quality-focused work. When I talk to blue-collar union members I’m struck by how proud they are of their jobs. I think that everyone wants to be doing meaningful things for the 8 hours a day we spend working, it must just be buried real deep in some of the Valley ideology people.
Having worked at a large variety of tech companies, I think it’s just largely a self-selection type of stuff. People who work at the most highly paid and most “prestigious” workplaces self-select themselves to be people who only care about the money and social status, especially since these companies require the most studying to get into
I’ve shared your experiences with other “non-prestigious” companies where people do care a lot more about their work and really just anything other than material goods/money
My current co-workers are the most devoid of interest in the arts, sociology, psychology, really anything related to human expression and condition I’ve ever seen