The union was organized in secret for a year before the announcement, and has more than 800 members as of this-writing, including full-time employees, temps, vendors, and contractors. That is when the Alphabet Workers Union was announced, with the mission to protect workers at Google’s parent company. One of the most significant early tech unionization successes happened in January of this year. They deserve to take home a fair share of the enormous value they create everyday, and they deserve to be treated with dignity on the job.” A New Phenomenon “Tech workers have produced innovations that are changing the course of history-and made their bosses rich in the process. “The time and energy of working people have built tech companies into some of the most valuable entities on the planet,” says Liz Shuler, Secretary-Treasurer at the AFL-CIO, the largest federation of unions in the U.S. Tech unions represent a new twist on an existing form of worker organization, and they’re looking to disrupt the status quo of major tech companies like Google. Yet given the high number of well-paid tech workers, they also engage in a new type of activism around the morality of tech companies’ operating practices and business relationships. These unions fight for traditional issues that unions in other industries fight for, like better wages, hours, and working conditions. Technology unions are new labor organizations that full-time and contract employees at major tech companies are attempting to form or have successfully formed. Three years later, the momentum from that activism has resulted in the first formal technology unions. Tech employee activism is nothing new, but the momentum generated by the 2018 wave of protests was. In a letter to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, the employees wrote, “many Microsoft employees don’t believe that what we build should be used for waging war.” Department of Defense’s Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) project. Customs and Border Protection.Īlso in the headlines was an effort by some Microsoft employees to protest the company’s bid for work on the U.S. The same year, hundreds of Salesforce employees signed a letter to CEO Marc Benioff protesting the fact the company sold products to U.S. In late 2018, thousands of workers walked out of Google offices around the globe to protest the company’s handling of sexual harassment accusations against prominent executives. “It is no accident that tech unionization efforts are moving fast, planning as they go, and are unafraid to break things.” Gig workers, deliberately deprived of employee protections, have been putting up a fight.“ The Unionization of Technology Companies”Ĭommunications of the ACM, August 2021, Vol. Recently, Google workers have formed a minority union, and Amazon warehouse workers in Alabama are currently holding an NLRB election. After a long fallow period, a crop of digital newsrooms including this one, the New Yorker, the Los Angeles Times, Bustle, the Onion, etc. Medium workers are joining a wave of organising efforts. Medium was not immediately available for comment. But given the broad support for an election itself, the union seems like a foregone conclusion, and they’ve asked that Medium voluntarily recognise them. The company doesn’t have to bargain with them unless workers get a majority pro-union vote through a National Labour Relations Board election. It offers a partner program that pays writers a little for views, but for the most part, it’s not yet a viable career path for independent writers, nor, as of 2019, was it profitable.Ī spokesperson for the Medium Workers Union - which is primarily made up of engineers, but also editors, designers, and others - told Gizmodo that about 140 people would be eligible for union representation and that an overwhelming majority signed cards in favour of forming a union. It’s an uncontroversial clean slate where Elizabeth Warren announced the end of her presidential run and Jeff Bezos alleged that the National Enquirer tried to blackmail him with dick pics. Medium offers a platform to create subscriber-supported personal blogs and laudable investigative reporting. Medium is a democratic, subscription-based platform, created by Twitter co-founder Ev Williams, who seemed, as of 2018, to view it as Twitter’s antiserum. From Amazon warehouse pickers to developers, workers are collectively deciding that they’re over the techno-utopian bullshit that’s taught us building things online is a labour of love, gig workers are reaping plentiful time off, writing on the internet isn’t a real job, and unions stifle innovation. With today’s news that workers at Medium have overwhelmingly voted to form a union, it’s hard not to get a little mushy about the labour rights zeitgeist.
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