Ethan Marcotte

There’s a resurgent labor movement in the tech industry. Tech workers—designers, engineers, writers, and many others—have learned that when they stand together, they’re poised to build a better version of the tech industry. They haven’t stopped there: at companies from Kickstarter to Google, workers have formed unions. And you should, too.

But what are unions? And why do they matter? Ethan Marcotte answers these questions through extensive research and by interviewing tech workers with real-world union-building experience. Ethan shares these workers’ insights and stories, weaving them together to outline the process for forming a union of your very own. Because you—yes, you—deserve a tech union.

You Deserve a Tech Union

Katy Watkins

As the industry's attention has shifted to machine learning and artificial intelligence, entire industries have sprung up around the annotation of training data, often employing underpaid contractors in countries with few labor protections. And this model makes for incredibly big business. In January 2023, Time reported that OpenAI had hired Kenyan laborers and tasked them with “cleaning up” ChatGPT, their artificial intelligence chatbot. ChatGPT had been producing violent, sexist, and racist statements, and these workers were hired to tag and identify the problematic sentences. They were, effectively, training the software to be less bigoted. And the work was grueling.

If you've ever wondered how you can get through most of a day online without seeing truly disturbing content, it's due to the efforts of thousands of moderators, many of whom work as hourly contractors. These moderators spend their shifts sorting through flagged posts, searching for anything that might violate the company's terms of service. To be blunt: this is terrible, stressful, traumatizing work. These people work each day to sift through disturbing posts, imagery, and video, sanitizing social media feeds before they reach our screens—all for frighteningly low pay.

The costs of two-day delivery are frightfully high, and they’re paid by Amazon’s warehouse workers. 

There's an essay by Mandy Brown that I'd recommend to you, in which she digs into the industry's reliance on the words "technical" and "non-technical" to describe certain roles. And she gets to the heart of why that distinction is so incredibly broken:

People in "non-technical" roles are typically paid less, afforded less flexibility, and granted less prestige. The categories of "technical" and "non-technical" serve wholly to privilege those in the former, at the expense of the latter. But literally no product organization would survive a week without the deep—and, ld argue, technical—expertise of the people who are usually lumped into the "non" bucket. (https://bkaprt.com/ydtu47/05-40)

I’d like to suggest that there's a similar problem inherent in the term “tech worker”—that our existing definition is entirely too narrow, and rooted in incredibly classist assumptions about who does tech work. As we've discussed, there is a high and hidden cost to the creation of digital products and platforms, one foisted upon an entire class of workers that's been made largely invisible. They are paid hourly and poorly, often receive no benefits, and have nonexistent job security—but they are directly and literally responsible for making our products and platforms function. Why aren't they considered “tech workers” too?

Tech unions are not new. There's already a rich history of labor organizing in our industry. We just have to learn from it.

Matt Stein

A lone worker lodging a complaint could be ignored, or disciplined. (Or worse, dismissed outright.) But when a group of workers act together, it’s much, much harder to disregard them.

The American labor leader Eugene Debs once said, “While there is a lower class I am in it, while there is a criminal element I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free” (...). To my mind, that’s a beautiful expression of what solidarity can be. Our common humanity binds us together, and motivates us to fight for something better: for a workplace, and a world, that’s more just, fair, and kind.

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