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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Confronted by the moral injury of enshittifying a product you care about, harming the users you see yourself as representing, many tech workers balked at the prospect. Because tech workers were scarce - and because there were plenty of employment prospects for workers who quit - they could actually prevent their bosses from making their products worse:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/25/moral-injury/#enshittification
But those days are behind us, too. Mass tech worker layoffs have gutted tech workers’ confidence.
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When Google lays off 12,000 tech workers just months after a stock buyback that would have paid their wages for the next 27 years, they deliver two benefits to their shareholders. It’s not just the short-term gains from the financial engineering - there’s the long-term gain of gutting worker power and stripping away the final impediment to enshittification:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/10/the-proletarianization-of-tech-workers/
No matter how strong an individual tech worker’s bargaining power was, it was always brittle.
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Long before googlers were being laid off in five-digit cohorts, they were working in an environment where harassment and predation were just part of the job. The 20,000+ googlers who walked off the job in 2018 were an important step towards replacing the system where each tech worker’s power was limited to their moment-to-moment importance to their bosses’ plans with a new system based on a collective identity.
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Only through collective action and solidarity - unions - could tech workers hope to truly resist all the moral injuries of their bosses enshittification imperatives. No surprise then, that tech unions are on the rise:
https://abookapart.com/products/you-deserve-a-tech-union
But what is a little surprising - and very heartening! - is what happens when techies start to self-identify as workers: they come to understand that they share common cause with the other workers at the bottom of the tech stack.
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@pluralistic@mamot.fr yes!!!
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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