We’re living in the #enshittocene, in which the forces of enshittification are turning everything from our cars to our streaming services to our dishwashers into thoroughly enshittifified piles of shit. Call it the Great Enshittening:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/09/lead-me-not-into-temptation/#chamberlain
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If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/13/solidarity-forever/#tech-unions
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Think of Amazon’s tech workers walking out in solidarity with Amazon’s warehouse workers:
https://gizmodo.com/tech-workers-speak-out-in-support-of-amazon-warehouse-s-1842839301
Superficially, the bottom rank of the tech industry is as different from the tech workers at the top as you can imagine. Tech workers are formally employed, with stock options, health care and theme-park “campuses” with gyms and gourmet cafeterias.
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The gig workers who pack, drive, deliver and support tech products aren’t even employees - they’re misclassified as contractors. They don’t get free massages - they get AI bosses that monitor their eyeballs and dock their paychecks for peeing:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/11/robots-stole-my-jerb/#computer-says-no
Gig workers desperately need unions, but they also derive extraordinary benefits from self-help measures.
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When an app is your boss, another app can make all the difference to your working conditions. Take #Para, an app that fights algorithmic wage discrimination by allowing gig workers to collectively and automatically refuse any job where the pay is below a certain threshold, forcing the algorithm to pay everyone more:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/tech-rights-are-workers-rights-doordash-edition
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Para is fighting a grim legal and technical battle against companies like #Doordash, whose margins depend on atomized workers with atomized apps, prohibited from countertwiddling. This is a surprisingly effective tactic: in Indonesia, gig workers co-ops create suites of #tuyul apps that modify the behavior of their bosses’ apps’, unilaterally securing concessions that they lack the bargaining power to secure by other means:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/08/tuyul-apps/#gojek
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Tuyul apps and other countertwiddling aren’t a substitute for unionization, they’re an adjunct to it. The union negotiator whose rank-and-file are able to modify the apps that monitor and control their working conditions operates from a position of strength. “Please give my members more bathroom breaks” is a lot weaker than, “If you want my members to stop hacking their apps so they can piss when they need to, you’re going to have to give them official bathroom breaks.”
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This is where solidarity between the high-paid tech workers at the keyboard and low-paid tech workers on the delivery bikes comes in. Together, they can wring more concessions from their bosses, sure. But unionized coders can give their unionized delivery riders the apps they need to countertwiddle and increase the bargaining leverage of all the workers in the union.
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When unionized coders’ bosses force them to put enshittifying anti-features in the apps they care about, unionized front-line workers can run counter-apps to disenshittify them.
Other sectors are already doing versions of this. The ouster of the corrupt leadership of the #Teamsters ushered in a new, radical era that produced historic wage/working condition gains for drivers and the abolition of the two-tier contract system that eventually destroys any union that tries it.
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That change in leadership was possible because the Teamsters organized the #HarvardGradStudents, and those Harvard kids memorized the union rulebook. At the historic conference where the old guard was abolished, it was teamwork between the union rank-and-file and the rules-lawyers from Harvard that turned the proceedings around:
https://theintercept.com/2023/04/07/deconstructed-union-dhl-teamsters-uaw/
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@pluralistic@mamot.fr Was the #HarvardGradStudents those #UAW employees who went to the Harvard Trade Union Program (HTUP)? This was a confusing point for me in the #Intercept article and not clarified well.
We are deep into the enshittocene and it is terribly demoralizing. But by understanding the constraints that kept enshittification at bay, we can rebuild them, and shore them up. Labor organizing among all kinds of tech workers isn’t just a way to get a better deal for those workers - it’s key to the disenshittification of all our lives.
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@pluralistic@mamot.fr Interesting. I could relate to a lot of it, esp. the bit about 2-tier salary schedules being a union-killer.