Tech’s new staff movement is taking advantage of lessons learned a century ago

The rise of the technological staff

Even in the early 1990s, Lerner went to war with Apple as the organizer of the Justice Goalkeepers campaign and won union rights for subcontracted cleaning workers in the technology sector, “Who’s the tech worker?” Question. large loomed. Through these successful campaigns, Lerner helped spread the definition of a technology employee to anyone who runs a technology company. Cori Crider, lawyer The fox glove, A company that aims to challenge the power of Big Tech, has been working with subcontracted content moderators, real human beings who go through daily publications with violence and racism and graphic sex, trying to determine what violates a constantly changing set of rules.

These employees are often bound by public bond agreements, which prevent them from speaking publicly about their working conditions. This may lead to the denial of the existence of companies like Facebook – a confirmation that the company maintained last year, after announcing that moderators working for the subcontracting company Accenture were returning to the office during the pandemic.

Technical staff outside the normal definition of “workers” continue to find ways to organize and protect themselves. Coworker.org, a campaign platform for organizing workers, is using donations from technology-rich workers to build a “solidarity fund” distributed to workers on the other side of the supply chain technology. Amazon Mechanical platform platform concert staff are using the site Turkoptic come together and fight for better conditions.

At the other end of the spectrum of tech workers are those who build electric cars at a factory in Tesla Fremont, California. Before the Elon Musk Company purchased the Fremont facility, it was known as New United Motors Manufacturing, Inc., or the partnership between NUMMI, General Motors and Toyota, where Japanese “lean production” was brought to America. NUMMI did not survive the failure of GM in 2008, and was captured by Tesla.

Collaborating with United Auto Workers was one of NUMMI’s biggest innovations, but Tesla went the other way. Recently, an NLRB administrative judge ruled that several of the company’s actions in response to the worker’s organization were illegal, including a couple of tweets from Musk, as well as harassment of workers handing out union pamphlets, banning union shirts and buttons. , and the organizers ’interrogation and release of one. The NLRB’s sanctions are more than just a swipe of a finger — Musk has the right to unionize workers and must read a statement to employees to rehire a fired employee. He has appealed the decision however.

Workers at the plant, as well as union supporters, are keen to produce electric vehicles, but note that the plant’s technical sophistication does not prevent it from throwing back manual labor or injuries. Jose Moran, one of the leaders of the union push and a former NUMMI employee, wrote a blog post about the things he wanted to improve, including the hard pace of work and some poorly designed machinery.

Self-employed people have been struggling with machinery since the days of Henry Ford. But the stories of Tesla employees echo the complaints of self-employed people who struggled to “accelerate” in the 1960s — in a way that management would use new technology to get a work pace — in places like Lordstown, Ohio, and Detroit. A wave of rebellion within the union and wild boar strike challenged the idea that automation facilitated their work.

As the machines accelerated the manufacturing process, workers had to move faster to maintain them. Tesla’s self-employed, far from representing the working aristocracy among self-employed, say they earn less than GM and Ford’s union workers. As Moran wrote, “I often feel like I’m working for a future company under the working conditions of the past.”

Long game

Even in Amazon stores everything old is new again. “Automotive tried to do a lot of automation in the ’80s and’ 70s, and they basically couldn’t do more. And Tesla was basically trying to do the same thing,” says Tyler Hamilton, an employee at the Amazon warehouse in Minneapolis. “It’s the same with Amazon. You can do so much with automation. ”

Mohamed Mire, a colleague of Hamilton, explained that most of Amazon’s praised technology focuses on employee tracking rather than efficient work. The scanners that employees use to scan packages also track what is called “Break”, and if they write theirs productivity rate it falls. Hamilton’s robots with “giant roombas” carry goods around the warehouse but often don’t work, so lately his job has been to set up robots. Amazon data shows that injury rates are higher in facilities with robots than without them.