The Alphabet Workers Union, while not legally recognized by the National Labor Relations Board, has achieved some changes on behalf of specific workers. "Whenever people are surveyed, it's very clear that an overwhelming majority want to have a union." (Protocol's July 2021 survey found that about half of all tech workers are interested in joining a union in their workplace).Įarly union efforts have had mixed successes and failures. Even in the coming weeks, there will be something really exciting that we get to announce," Emma Kinema, an organizer for CODE-CWA (CWA's tech unionizing effort), told Protocol. At CWA alone, we have over 2,000 tech workers organized, the majority of whom are bargaining right now. "We are seeing the beginning of an explosion of activity in our industry. The International Brotherhood of Teamsters has formed a department just focused on Amazon organizing the Communications Workers of America and the Office and Professional Employees International Union both have branches dedicated just to organizing tech workers Uber, Lyft, DoorDash and other gig companies are battling gig-worker advocates in California, Massachusetts and federally over whether their gig workers can be defined as employees. Photo: Underwood Archives/Getty Imagesīut whether tech leaders like it or not, questions of worker rights and labor laws are now mostly a battle between tech companies and unions. Software engineers at Google, Apple, Facebook and other major companies often say they have no interest in forming a union, or see unions as a tool for workers in mines and factories, not those who sit behind a desk every day.Ī woman pickets lettuce shipments in 1936. Peter Maguire, a union leader for American carpenters who is widely considered one of the founders of Labor Day, called it a day to celebrate workers "who from rude nature have delved and carved all the grandeur we behold."Ĭompanies like Amazon and Uber say that they have created abundant, high-paying jobs that allow worker flexibility, and that union efforts would take away both the freedom and high salaries they've provided. Warehouse storage and fulfillment, delivery and gig driving, data center maintenance, AI data training and cleaning, content moderation, electric-car construction, retail sales, technology repair - these jobs power the financial machine of American tech companies, and the people who work them are the ones that Labor Day was first designed to celebrate.Īnd while most of the tech industry is not unionized, Labor Day is inextricably tied to the American unions that led the effort for its formation and the union leaders who still see the holiday as a day to celebrate collective action and worker power. The lives of grocery store cashiers, fast-food cooks and factory line workers are shaped by the technology designed to make their jobs faster. Almost every job is somehow a tech job today. Many of the country's largest employers and wealthiest companies are tech companies (Amazon, Google, Apple, Tesla) or tech-adjacent ( Walmart, FedEx, IBM, Target), and the biggest fights over worker rights are happening within their physical (and virtual) halls. Yet to labor leaders today, the 2021 Labor Day story is inextricably a tech company story. Labor Day became a federal holiday about 100 years before anyone could conceive of a tech company. The Teamsters see Amazon as an existential threat to its unionized workers and believe the company is reshaping industry standards in a way that hurts the worker rights and protections the company has secured in past union contracts. Now, whether there's a horse in front of them, or a keyboard in front of them, it's the same exploitative practice," he said. Drivers, when there were horses in front of us and reins in our hands, all of those people were waiting in line to pick up freight, we were independent contractors. Amazon's system for delivery relies partially on drivers contracted as freelancers battling for pickups outside the warehouse, just like the shipyards of old - and to Korgan, the fight is the same as it was a century ago. No one has ever come close to a successful union drive at Amazon, but Randy Korgan, the leader of the Amazon collective organizing push at the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, thinks his union could be the first to replicate the efforts that began in 1903. That union eventually represented almost every U.S.-based trucker and delivery driver for the next century - until the birth of Amazon fulfillment services. When the International Brotherhood of Teamsters formed a union in 1903, its leaders wanted horse and buggy drivers to unite against the capricious ways that companies selected their freelance wagon drivers at shipyards.
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