Beyond the Default

Jan 3

Lessons on professional-managerial class unionizing with N

In recent years more tech workplaces have been unionizing—from Kickstarter, to Glitch and Alphabet. Many of these unions have joined the Communications Workers of America (CWA). There have been many voluntary recognitions and successful campaigns, and there have also been failed unionization efforts despite the fact that more than half of all tech workers say they would join a union. We sat down with N to learn more about the intricacies of unionizing, strategy, how to balance membership with political visions, and the importance of rest.

Xiaowei Wang:

Could you introduce yourself?

I'm N. I'm currently located in the Bay Area, which is on the traditional territory of the Ohlone peoples. Right now, I happen to be in Palo Alto, which I believe is Muwekma territory. I'm a tech worker. I worked on mapping technology at Google. I have always had a really deep interest in ethical uses of technology and in whether technology can be ethical at all. I've also been really interested for a long time in labor and in welfare politics, and I'm really interested in whether technology has any kind of role in advancing that politics or just generally whether technology and politics interact in productive or harmful ways.

For the longest time, honestly, I thought of tech and social justice as entirely separate. I had a vaguely social-democratic politics as a kid, but simultaneously I had a very positive impression of tech. I always thought that tech was an inherently good thing to do because it was innovation that was building the capacity to improve human well-being, and I thought that all technological progress was human progress, as well. I think I held this view until maybe, like, 2015 or 2016.

One of the things that really changed my politics was listening to a podcast about Clinton’s welfare reform and learning the deliberate cruelty with which it was designed and how that cruelty brought pain into the lives of so many people. Bernie’s campaign for the presidential nomination in 2016 also made me think much more about politics generally and the kind of work it takes to advance a social-democratic vision of society. I think anyone who naturally investigates their commitment to justice and, at the same time, holds a privileged economic position is going to find those things end up in conflict. And that's what happened with me, especially seeing the impact of big tech on a number of political and social issues I cared about. Seeing the impact of WhatsApp on my family, for example, and how easily putatively value-neutral tech platforms could be used to advance all sorts of injustice.

Being more politically educated led me to think more critically about tech. That's generally what I'd say.

Xiaowei:

Could you talk about your Logic School project focus and how it began?

As backstory, I accepted my job offer at Google literally one day before the New York Times published an article revealing that Andy Rubin, the Android CEO, was a serial sexual harasser and predator within the company and that Google gave him a massive payout essentially as a bribe to keep him from going to a competitor after they fired him. And Google employees responded in huge numbers by staging a massive walkout. It was a crystal-clear illustration of the power employees have over their employers and the conditions of their work. I immediately thought, of course, that, in addition to my engineering role, this is an essential part of my job, figuring out how to turn that expression into something lasting. I’ve always been dogmatically supportive of unions, in any location for any job—all workers deserve a union, regardless of what they do. It was obvious to me that if there were any kind of effort toward forming a union at Google, I would support it. I was most involved during the very earliest stages of the union, when it was just five or ten people getting together to read No Shortcuts at lunch, and my goal was to keep things going until we had more members, a full-time organizer, and dues. Once we got to that stage, I stepped back because I couldn't handle both my regular job and union work and needed to focus on the former.

Yindi:

How is your project currently going?

It's been pretty tough since summer began. I've been struggling a lot with my mental health and my personal health. This became especially acute after my [family member] passed away due to COVID and many other family members tested positive and were showing worrying symptoms at a time when hospitals were turning away patients. It prompted me to go see a professional. For the longest time I never felt I could afford to go to a therapist or psychiatrist and so just struggled with low-level mental health problems for years; it's only since this summer that I've taken any steps toward solving this.

Yindi:

I'm really sorry about the loss of your [family member]. And also all the different compounding stresses that you've been experiencing.

I have had productive conversations with friends of mine who have similar politics within Google and have tried to get them to be more interested in the project of being part of a union within the company. Much of my work has been in the form of reading and thinking about unionization case studies in other countries, companies, or industries.

One thing I've noticed is that we can learn less from European professional unions than one might expect. In countries like France or Switzerland or Germany, with legal structures that strongly support employee unions and organizations, it seems like unions tend to be very staid, not particularly agitational entities because they don't actually have to fight to win a union recognition campaign. On the other hand, successful professional unions in developing countries with more hostile labor law will often have a very strong and strident politics, just not necessarily a progressive or social-democratic politics. I can't speak to white-collar unions in India, but white-collar workers there have very right-wing politics—they were the original social base of the BJP [Bharatiya Janata Party], back when it was more explicitly capitalist and casteist than it is today. Even in places where their politics is less objectionable, it's still more liberal than progressive. Doctors unions, for example, in Sudan and Burma have been strongly associated with movements against coups and for democratization. But they're advocating for liberal democracy, not necessarily for a more comprehensive social or economic vision, and I would imagine they have a wide variety of views on the latter.

It's hard to know of many examples of industrial-style unionism within a white-collar context. In my project, I wanted to understand what actual struggle over workplace conditions looks like for white-collar employees, and how it differs from historic struggles. The truth is, there's not a template for it—we are writing the book as we go along. I learned a lot from some case studies, though - I looked at Kickstarter's effort, the recent wave of newspaper unionizations, and graduate school unions, and came away with a few thoughts.

One is that, in many of these "knowledge economy" workplaces, the evaluation and performance process is incredibly dysfunctional. Everyone is like an individual craftsperson, honing their skills and gearing up for competition against their peers. I wonder if that's why the News Guild has that name. This is really apparent in grad school too - you know you'll all be competing against each other on the job market eventually. And people really detest it. It's perfect for management because the more your employees compete against each other, the more they're incentivized to work in a way that doesn't depend on you as the employer doing something to woo them—it's about employees trying to one-up each other. It's a workplace condition that requires collective action to solve.

Everybody's well-being has been sapped by this because it makes unreasonable demands on us and is insensitive to our unique circumstances. Some of us might be raising children, struggling with mental or physical health, or caring for family. Everybody has a different story, and when we are trying to evaluate people's performance, you can't talk about it in the context of their work only. There isn't value in evaluating or comparing ourselves against each other, because we all operate in different contexts.

What we need to instead do is recognize that there is that difference, and our obligation as coworkers and colleagues is to support each other in doing the best work that each of us can do - not fighting to claim the first prize for “best” worker. That support is antithetical to what management will want - they want people to sacrifice things in their life for their job, to work longer and disregard their health to get further ahead. I grew up in an ultra-competitive environment, and sadly got used to that kind of dynamic.

Calling out this incentive system and how it's problematic and wrong can be an important tool to build solidarity.

Yindi:

What does your unionizing work look like now?

Many of the unions that do exist in tech are at smaller companies, where I think social organizing is able to successfully build a majority union. Scaling the principles to a huge workplace feels really daunting.

At a place like Google, there's more than 10,000 employees at some of these offices. In some ways, that's a strength - more chances there are people like me who believe in unions no matter what, and who will sign on to a minority union. But getting to a majority union becomes scary to contemplate.

Unions work best when class interest is at the forefront. But the core problem is that a lot of these white-collar workers often don't identify as working class. Or they view themselves often as professional-class people who have a decent amount of money. One of the things that's really powerful for people is self-interest. One of the challenges of white-collar unionization is sometimes you are going against your direct material self-interest, right? You might feel like you pay dues and you're not getting anything out of it.

A real challenge is that big tech companies are very good at responding hyper-fast to the number-one complaints that people have, which are around compensation and working conditions... I was involved in trying to get people to be more aware of the unfairness in which people returning to the office were being treated versus people going fully remote. The company completely capitulated in response—now you get compensated in a manner adjusted for cost of living and cost of housing. But I don't feel great about this or treat it as a win - compensation is ugly, at least to me, because it's fundamentally making a lot of people who are already rich even richer.

Ideally, what a union should be for is control of what the company is doing. Not just a voice for employees, but a voice for all people impacted by Google products. Think of the Rolls Royce workers who went on strike over British support for Pinochet. But to get from A to B, you need to first have a strong majority union that can do political education. And to do that, you need to focus union work on increasing membership and being responsive to members.

When you don't do this well, things stagnate. This can lead to bad situations in legacy unions like SEIU 1000, for example, the California state employees union. That union is really internally dysfunctional right now. The longtime president of the union had an iron grip, very authoritarian and not collaborative. Now you have this new guy for president who had this very right-wing stance—he is strongly opposed to vaccine mandates. He says that the most important component of the state are people like prisons guards and the police and that’s who the union should be speaking up for. He almost wants to decertify the union and remove the union’s spending on politics entirely but increase a strike fund. The challenge is to have strong unions and also maintain a membership that is not apathetic, that maintains people’s trust, that uses that kind of power to educate people. And that’s a long process, a multi-generational process potentially.

Yindi:

Have you thought about the main audience you're trying to reach?

I think people who want to build unions at their tech companies but also be able to get to the position of causing some trouble. It's hard, right? It’s a lot of people saying the right things and feeling solidarity while at the same time realizing they don't have that much power within a group of one thousand or two thousand people, out of tens of thousands. We're not able to do all that much. We're a pretty small fraction of a company.

One of the things I learned from the conversation with union organizers for my project in terms of nuts and bolts of organizing is you really do have to think about the people who don't have any particularly strong commitment ideologically to forming a union. Those are the people you have to go after rather than the people already on board with you. In fact, sometimes people who are ideologically on your side think about their own self-interest. You have to find a way to make unionization appealing. And a good metric that one organizer I talked to was using was how many STEM graduate students are within the union because they tend to be less political on the whole. They might have more cushy experiences. They have more sought-after [situations], from a job perspective. So they tend to be more willing to put up with crap. So if you can find a good pitch for people in STEM or for people who are relatively advantaged within this hierarchical system that people have built up, then you've got something going. And it’s really important for leadership to think strategically about what is possible for them.

Also, sometimes it's very appealing to do things because it's the right thing to do, and making a statement is really important. But on the other hand, it's also really important to think about when to hold your fire and when to not have certain conversations. This is kind of the ugliest part of unions, right? They have to be very pragmatic in order to build up credibility among their membership and to be strong. When you’re building up a union, you may not be able to afford to take stances that aren't germane to what you're working on at the moment. From my conversations I learned a sign of union weakness is often when the leadership is highly political but not organizing a ton and is engaged in politics with the existing members as opposed to trying to grow the membership or organize more people. And when the union is stronger, some of that stuff, it's like, well, we know we're on board, ideologically and temperamentally in agreement, but we have to prioritize the process of organizing and onboarding members—we have to focus on membership, on educating that membership so that we have a membership that can bring muscle to this kind of work.

Yindi:

I appreciate you repeating that. It really resonated with me.

But it's tricky at the same time, right? There are construction unions being all in for extractive industry and pipelines, as an example. You can’t forget that a union is also meant to be there to advance some vision of the world, not just membership.