Pluralistic: The future of Amazon coders is the present of Amazon warehouse workers (13 Mar 2025)

pluralist
1

Originally published at: Pluralistic: The future of Amazon coders is the present of Amazon warehouse workers (13 Mar 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow



Today's links


A magnified image of the inside of an automated backup tape library, with gleaming racks of silver tape drives receding into the distance. In the foreground is a pile of dirt being shoveled by three figures in prisoner's stripes. Two of the figures' heads have been replaced with cliche hacker-in-hoodie heads, from which shine yellow, inverted Amazon 'smile' logos, such that the smile is a frown. The remaining figure's head has been replaced with a horse's head. Behind the figure is an impatiently poised man in a sharp business suit, glaring at his watch. His head has been replaced with the glaring red eye of HAL 9000 from Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey.'

The future of Amazon coders is the present of Amazon warehouse workers (permalink)

My theory of the "shitty technology adoption curve" holds that you can predict the future impact of abusive technologies on you by observing the way these are deployed against people who have less social power than you:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/11/the-shitty-tech-adoption-curve-has-a-business-model/

When you have a new, abusive technology, you can't just aim it at rich, powerful people, because when they complain, they get results. To successfully deploy that abusive tech, you need to work your way up the privilege gradient, starting with people with no power, like prisoners, refugees, and mental patients. This starts the process of normalization, even as it sands down some of the technology's rough edges against their tender bodies. Once that's done, you can move on to people with more social power – immigrants, blue collar workers, school children. Step by step, you normalize and smooth out the abusive tech, until you can apply it to everyone – even rich and powerful people. Think of the deployment of CCTV, facial recognition, location tracking, and web surveillance.

All this means that blue collar workers are the pioneering early adopters of the bossware that will shortly be tormenting their white-collar colleagues elsewhere in the business. It's as William Gibson prophesied: "The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed" (it's pooled up thick and noxious around the ankles of blue-collar workers, refugees, mental patients, etc).

Nowhere is this rule more salient than in Big Tech firms. Tech companies have thoroughly segregated workforces. Delivery drivers, customer service reps, data-labelers, warehouse workers and other "green badge," low-status workers are the testing ground for their employer's own disciplinary technology, which monitors them down to the keystroke, the eye-movement, and the pee break. Meanwhile, the "blue badge" white-collar coders get stock options, gourmet cafeterias, free massages, day care and complimentary egg-freezing so they can delay fertility. Companies like Google not only use separate entrance for their different classes of workers – they stagger their shifts so that the elite workers don't even see their lower-status counterparts.

Importantly, almost none of these workers – whether low-status or high – are unionized. Tech union density is so thin, it's almost nonexistent. It's easy to see why elite tech workers wouldn't bother with unionizing: with such fantastic wages and so many perks, why endure the tedium of meetings and memos? But then there's the rest of the workers, who are subjected to endless "electronic whipping" by bossware and who take home wages that look like pocket change when compared to the tech division's compensation. These workers have every reason to unionize, living as they do in the dystopian future of labor.

At Amazon warehouses, workers are injured at three times the rate of warehouse workers at competing firms. They are penalized for "time off task" (like taking a piss break). They are made to stand in long, humiliating body-search lines when they go on- and off-shift, hours every week, without compensation. Variations on this theme play out in other blue-collar sectors of the Amazon empire, like Amazon delivery drivers and Whole Food shelf-stockers.

Those workers have every reason to unionize, and they have done their damndest, but Amazon has defeated worker union drives, again and again. How does Amazon win these battles? Simple: they cheat. They illegally fire union organizers:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/31/reality-endorses-sanders/#instacart-wholefoods-amazon

And then they smear unions to the press and to their own workers with lies (that subsequently leak):

https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/03/socially-useless-parasite/#christian-smalls

They spend millions on anti-union tech, spying on workers and creating "heatmaps" that let them direct their anti-union efforts to specific stores and facilities:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/21/all-in-it-together/#guard-labor-v-redistribution

They make workers use an official chat app, and then block any messages containing forbidden words, like "fairness," "grievance" and "diversity":

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/05/doubleplusrelentless/#quackspeak

That's just the tip of the iceberg. A new investigation by Northwestern University's Teke Wiggin draws on worker interviews and FOIA requests to the NLRB to assemble a first-of-its-kind catalog of Amazon's labor-disciplining, union-busting tactics:

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/23780231251318389

Disciplining labor and busting unions go hand in hand. It's a simple equation: the harder it is for your workers to form a union, the worse you can treat them without facing labor reprisals, because individual workers' options are limited to a) quitting or b) sucking it up, while unionized workers can grieve, sue, and strike.

At the core of Amazon's labor discipline technology is "algorithmic management," which is exactly what it sounds like: replacing middle managers with software that counts your keystrokes, watches your eyeballs, or applies a virtual caliper to some other metric to decide whether you're a good worker or a rotten apple:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/26/hawtch-hawtch/#you-treasure-what-you-measure

Automation theory describes two poles of workplace automation: centaurs (in which workers are assisted by technology) and "reverse-centaurs" (in which workers provide assistance to technology):

https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/19/the-shakedown/#weird-flex

Amazon is a reverse-centaurism pioneer. Take the delivery drivers whose every maneuver, eyeball movement, and turn signal is analyzed and inevitably, found wanting, as workers seek to satisfy impossible quotas that can't even be met if you pee in a bottle instead of taking toilet breaks:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/20/release-energy/#the-bitterest-lemon

Then there's the warehouse workers who are also tormented with impossible, pisscall-annihilating quotas. Some of these workers are fitted with haptic wristbands that buzz to tell them they're being too slow at picking up an item and dropping it into a box, pushing them to faster, joint-destroying paces that account for Amazon's enduring position as the most worker-maiming warehouse employer in the nation:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/05/la-bookseller-royalty/#megacycle

In his paper, Wiggin does important work connecting these "electronic whips" to Amazon's arsenal of traditional union-busting weapons, like "captive audience" meetings where workers are forced to sit through hours of anti-union indoctrination. For Wiggin, bossware tools aren't just a stick to beat workers with – they're also a carrot that can be used to diffuse a worker's outrage ahead of a key union vote.

Algorithmic management isn't just software that wrings more work out of workers – it's software that replaces managers. By surveilling workers – both on the job and in social media spaces (like subreddits) where workers gather to talk, Amazon can tune the "electronic whip," reducing quotas and easing the pace of work so that workers view their jobs more favorably and are more receptive to anti-union propaganda.

This is "twiddling" – exploiting the digital flexibility of a system to "twiddle the knobs" governing its business logic, changing everything from prices to wages, search rankings to recommendations, in realtime, for every customer and worker:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/twiddler/

Twiddling combines surveillance data with flexible business logic to create an unbeatable house advantage. If you're an Amazon shopper, you get twiddled all the time, as Amazon replaces the best matches for your searches with paid results. If you buy that first product result, you'll pay an average of 29% more than the best match for your search:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/06/attention-rents/#consumer-welfare-queens

Worker-side twiddling is even more dystopian. When a nurse is assigned a shift by an "Uber for nurses" app, the app checks whether the worker has overdue credit card bills, which trigger lower wages (on the theory that an indebted worker is a desperate worker):

https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/18/loose-flapping-ends/#luigi-has-a-point

When it comes to union-busting, Amazon's found a new use for twiddling: lessening the pace of work, which Wiggin calls "algorithmic slack-cutting." The important thing about algorithmic slack-cutting is that it's only temporary. The algorithm that reduces your work-load in the runup to a union vote can then dial the pace of work up afterward, by small, random increments that are below the threshold at which they register on the human sensory apparatus. They're not so much boiling the frog as poaching it.

Meanwhile, Amazon gets to flood the zone with anti-union messages, including mandatory messages on the app that assigns your shifts – a captive audience meeting in every pocket.

Between social media surveillance and on-the-job surveillance, Amazon has built a powerful training set for algorithms designed to crush workplace democracy. That's how things go for Amazon's warehouse workers and delivery drivers, and the shelf-stockers at Whole Foods.

But of course, the picture is very different for Amazon's techies, who enjoy the industry standard of high wages and lavish perks.

For now.

The tech industry is in the midst of three years' worth of mass layoffs: 260K in 2023, 150k in 2024, tens of thousands this year. None of this is due to a shortfall in profits, mind: Google laid off 12,000 workers just weeks after staging a stock buyback that would have funded their salaries for 27 years. Meta just announced a 5% across-the-board headcount cut and that it was doubling its executive bonuses.

In other words, tech is firing workers not because it must, but because it can. When workers depend on scarcity – instead of unions – as a source of power, they dig their own graves. For well-paid, scarcity-based coders, every new computer science graduate is the enemy, eroding the scarcity that your wages depend on.

Amazon coders get to come to work with pink mohawks, facial piercings, and black t-shirts that say things their bosses don't understand. They get to pee whenever they want to. That's not because Jeff Bezos is sentimentally attached to techies and bears personal animus toward warehouse workers. Jeff Bezos wants to pay his workforce as little as he can. He treats his tech workers with respect because he's afraid of them, because if they quit, he can't replace them, and without their work, he can't make money.

Once there's an army of unemployed coders who'll take your job, Jeff Bezos doesn't have to fear you anymore. He can fire you and replace you the next day.

Bezos is obviously incredibly horny for this. Like most tech bosses, he dreams of a world in which entitled hackers can't call their bosses dumbshits and decline to frog when they shout "jump!" That's why Amazon PR puts so much energy into trumpeting the business's use of AI to replace coders:

https://www.hrgrapevine.com/us/content/article/2024-08-22-amazon-cloud-ceo-warns-software-engineers-ai-could-replace-your-coding-work-within-2-years

It's not just that they're excited about firing coders and saving money – they're even more excited about transforming the job of "Amazon coder," from someone who solves complex technical problems to someone who performs tedious code review on automatically generated code barfed up by a chatbot:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/01/human-in-the-loop/#monkey-in-the-middle

"Code reviewer" is a much less fulfilling job than "programmer." Code reviewers are also easier to replace than programmers. A code reviewer is a reverse-centaur, a servant to the machine. Every time you hear "AI-assisted programmer," you should substitute "programmer-assisted AI."

Programming is even more bossware-ready than working in a warehouse. The machines coders use are much easier to fit with surveillance technology that monitors their performance – and spies on their communications, looking for dissenting chatter – than a warehouse floor. The only thing that stopped Jeff Bezos from treating his programmers like his warehouse workers is their scarcity. That scarcity is now going away.

That's bad news for Amazon customers, too. Tech workers often feel a sense of duty to their users, a "vocational awe" that drives them to put in long hours to make things their users will enjoy. The labor power of tech workers has long served as a check on the impulse to enshittify those products:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/25/moral-injury/#enshittification

As tech workers' power wanes, they don't just lose the ability to protect themselves from their bosses' greediest, most sadistic urges – they also lose the power to defend all of us. Smart tech workers know this. That's why Amazon tech workers walked out in support of Amazon warehouse workers:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/19/deastroturfing/#real-power

Which led to their prompt dismissal:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/14/abolish-silicon-valley/#hang-together-hang-separately

Tech worker/gig worker solidarity is the only way workers can win against tech bosses and defeat the shitty technology adoption curve:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/13/solidarity-forever/#tech-unions

Wiggin's report isn't just a snapshot of Amazon warehouse workers' dystopian present – it's a promise of Amazon tech workers' future. The future is here, in Amazon warehouses, and every day, it's getting closer to Amazon's technical offices.

(Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0, modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)


A Wayback Machine banner.

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago How DRM will harm the developing world https://web.archive.org/web/20050317005030/https://www.eff.org/IP/DRM/itu_drm.php

#20yrsago AOL weasels about its Terms of Service https://yro.slashdot.org/story/05/03/14/0138215/aol-were-not-spying-on-aim-users

#20yrsago State of the Blogosphere: it’s big and it’s growing https://web.archive.org/web/20050324095805/http://www.sifry.com/alerts/archives/000298.html

#10yrsago Anti-vaxxer ordered to pay EUR100K to winner of “measles aren’t real” bet https://web.archive.org/web/20150315001712/http://calvinayre.com/2015/03/13/business/biologist-ordered-to-pay-e100k-after-losing-wager-that-a-virus-causes-measles/

#5yrsago TSA lifts liquid bans, telcos lift data caps https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/14/masque-of-the-red-death/#security-theater

#5yrsago Honest Government Ads, Covid-19 edition https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/14/masque-of-the-red-death/#honest-covid

#5yrsago Ada Palmer on historical and modern censorship https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/14/masque-of-the-red-death/#ickyspeech

#5yrsago When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/14/masque-of-the-red-death/#eschatology-watch

#5yrsago Masque of the Red Death https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/14/masque-of-the-red-death/#masque

#1yrago The Coprophagic AI crisis https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/14/inhuman-centipede/#enshittibottification

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

A photo of me onstage, giving a speech, pounding the podium.


A screenshot of me at my desk, doing a livecast.

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

  • Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
    https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

  • Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026

  • Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

  • The Memex Method, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • Enshittification: a nonfiction book about platform decay for Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Status: second pass edit underway (readaloud)

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

  • Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS FEB 2025

Latest podcast: With Great Power Came No Responsibility: How Enshittification Conquered the 21st Century and How We Can Overthrow It https://craphound.com/news/2025/02/26/with-great-power-came-no-responsibility-how-enshittification-conquered-the-21st-century-and-how-we-can-overthrow-it/

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

How to get Pluralistic:

Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

Pluralistic.net

Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

Medium (no ads, paywalled):

https://doctorow.medium.com/

Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising):

https://twitter.com/doctorow

Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising):

https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic

"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

ISSN: 3066-764X

2

As a long-time reader and long-time programmer, I find it frustrating that you’ve been telling us for some time that LLMs ‘absolutely, positively cannot do your job’ (from here) and are now telling us that they are in fact going to take programmers’ jobs (with some fraction of programmers surviving the transition as code reviewers) without, as far as I know, having visibly changed your mind about whether LLM-based AI is solely a pointless cryptocurrency-like useless scam that’ll never be good for anything. Have you in fact changed your view on this?

3

I think you’ve missed the point - the LLM can’t write code that is trustworthy; it can only write code that is filled with bugs of the type machines make (and people don’t) that are especially difficult to detect, and represent substantial long-term technology debt.

A skilled programmer who is assisted by an LLM might have it write certain trivial, easily audited, routine parts of programs. This would raise code quality but at an additional expense (paying the programmer plus licensing the LLM). That’s a “centaur” arrangement.

But a programmer who assists the LLM (reverse centaur) is a very different matter. Trusting the LLM to write the code and asking the programmer to write it is a recipe for lots of subtle, lurking bugs, and the “cost savings” arises from using this arrangement as a cudgel to force programmers to accept lower wages.

4

I see. I took you to be saying that the cost savings would come from firing some programmers and keeping others as code reviewers (meaning that the LLMs would be at least in part replacing programmers). Apologies for the misread.

I do think you’re wrong about the claim that LLMs won’t be able to replace people’s jobs, particularly programmers. From the face of the code mines, it seems clear that you can (after a bit of a learning curve) write significantly more code per day (measured by functionality) with LLMs already, and that they continue to improve at coding rapidly. I think we’re also already seeing LLMs replacing people in some jobs (translators, call center employees) and I expect that to continue apace.

My take is that a) you’re pattern-matching generative AI with cryptocurrency too much, and b) you’ve accepted claims originating from linguistics folks (eg Emily Bender) that LLMs can’t possibly be doing anything at all like understanding because of their lack of grounding (eg in embodiment, or in a speech community); those claims sound really compelling but I think they’ve just turned out to be empirically wrong.

But time will tell!

(To be clear, I’m not advocating for or celebrating generative AI replacing workers here; I just think that it’ll work and will happen absent social coordination against it)

5

Is it already too late? Are the devs for big tech willing to rock the boat to risk solidarity now that layoffs are ongoing? It doesn’t seem like they’re doing much to push back now. They’ve been implementing enshittification for decades already.

Some traditional labor tactics don’t seem like they map onto tech very well. It would be hard for developers to picket Amazon. They have thousands of office and data center locations, and devs who want to cross the picket line can do so remotely without having to face their colleagues or be called a scab. What’s their leverage now that they’re replaceable?

The labor unions all seem ancient and out of touch and using tactics and tools that were pioneered 100 years ago. They could probably use some innovative disruption, actually.

In some respects, consumer boycotts might be easier than in the past, because Amazon doesn’t provide much that’s life-or-death to most people. It’s not like the bus you have to take to get to work, and your only alternative is walking 15 miles every day. It just means entering in your payment info and paying shipping for each order from merchants’ websites individually. That’s a very small inconvenience.

But would enough people join to cause Amazon pain?

It does seem to be working on Tesla for now.

Are there any good resources on how regular people can effectively fight back right now without committing a felony?

Cory, your writing on how other countries can ditch DRM to fight back gave me hope, but that’s outside my wheelhouse. Standing outside with a sign doesn’t seem to be very effective. We need to make joining the resistance at least as easy as signing up to drive for UberEats.

6

«Amazon coders get to come to work with pink mohawks, facial piercings, and black t-shirts that say things their bosses don’t understand. They get to pee whenever they want to […] Jeff Bezos wants to pay his workforce as little as he can. He treats his tech workers with respect because he’s afraid of them, because if they quit, he can’t replace them […] Tech worker/gig worker solidarity is the only way workers can win against tech bosses»

My usual theme: these people are upper-middle class rentiers who think that their interests for lower wages for working class people and higher asset incomes for themselves and most of them think this will last their own lifetime, which is what their boomer parents or grandparents also think (with more justification). The reason why they are rentiers and think with some justification that their income is asset based and will continue to be high is:

  • Employers divide tech worker in two categories: “creative geniuses” with degrees from prestigious “top 5” universities and “bulk headcounts” without them.
  • The high income of the “creative geniuses” described by Doctorow is actually not from their work but from their main asset that is the prestigious degree they (or usually their parents) have invested in. Admissions to prestigious universities very expensive and strictly limited and their student populations have not increased much because the value of that asset depends very much on its exclusivity.
  • The “bulk headcount” jobs have been already offshored to places where there is a long queue of workers with a non-prestigious degree begging for a tech job. Tech employers like Amazon, Microsoft, etc. often have 10 offshore tech workers for every one in the USA.

The result is that in England where offshoring and immigration have been pursued even more zealously than in the USA the typical salary offered to people with non-prestigious STEM degrees and 2 years of experience is around $25,000 per year which happens to be minimum wage. Most STEM jobs in the UK are in London and other areas with rents close to SF/LA levels, with the results that many coders in their twenties live 2 or 4 per bedroom like warehouse workers or office cleaners do.

What Doctorow describes here has already happened and the “creative geniuses” with “pink mohawks, facial piercings, and black t-shirts”, are the “trusties” of the bosses, and since they think that their interests are similar to those of their bosses their “solidarity” goes to those bosses, not to the “losers” in the warehouses.

I reckon that in the long term they are miscalculating, but I have known a lot of them and they are usually quite “sure of themselves” like their property-owning parents and grandparents.

PS: An important “detail” is that in India and China there is a gigantic oversupply of “bulk headcount” programmers and more generally of STEM graduates (with very high unemployment rates) as all those asian “tiger moms” have been pushing their children into those degrees as if it were still the dot.com boom. When Doctorow writes “The only thing that stopped Jeff Bezos from treating his programmers like his warehouse workers is their scarcity. That scarcity is now going away.” he is still living in the 1990s for the “bulk headcount” tech workers.

7

Labor rights are not something that you can buy online like a takeaway…

USA politics is pay-per-play: when labor unions could “sponsor” congresspeople like the corporations do by aggregating membership fees things were different, but one of the main anti-labor strategies has been to defund the labor unions to prevent them from “sponsoring” enough congresspeople.

Another issue is that even if the existing labor unions still had the means to “sponsor” enough congresspeople pretty much all labor unions officials and leaders are middle-class property owners looking forward to good pensions and they too want lower wages for everybody else and higher asset incomes for themselves.

So USA etc. workers should organize themselves into new labor unions but that would only be possible if there were laws that support the labor unions and the government did enforce them, but all politicians are “sponsored” by “investors” and pretty much all government officials are middle-class property owners looking forward to good pensions and they too want lower wages for everybody else and higher asset incomes for themselves.

There could a chance if there were persuasive public intellectuals who could make the valid case that the interests most middle-class property owners would be better served by more social insurance, higher wages, lower housing costs, but most public intellectuals, especially senior ones in universities and “think-tanks” are middle-class property owners looking forward to good pensions and they too want lower wages for everybody else and higher asset incomes for themselves.

8

I pretty much agree with you. You definitely laid out a convincing answer to my question: “Is it already too late?” with a yes- the top-tier devs who work at big tech headquarters have class solidarity with the boss, not the warehouse guys.

Though I’d say it’s not all lost. People’s tribal allegiances can be complex and multi-layered. I live in an area that has a high concentration of these folks. I personally know ~10-15 people who work pretty high up in both Google and Amazon. My area, and these tech workers, are all pretty progressive, but they are also financially dependent on the companies and are scared to rock the boat.

Many of them are very very uncomfortable with how things are going. They used to be able to ignore or compartmentalize the inequality and tell themselves that the place they worked is a net good for society, despite its flaws. But, this sudden public hard-right turn from the executives is causing major cognitive dissonance for them.

These devs are either dear friends with, or are themselves, queer, racial minorities, women who want reproductive rights, etc. And they are not necessarily going to sit by while 60 years of social progress is reversed on those fronts.

I’m not saying they are going to unanimously rise up and save us. They are complex individuals with competing alliances. But I am saying that they are not a lost cause. Many of them are looking for ways to fight against what’s happening, in ways that will be effective but not loose them everything.

I definitely wasn’t trying to say you should be able to order labor rights on doordash. Just that labor shouldn’t be beholden to processes that are 50 or 150 years out of date. If Capital has changed the rules for their own benefit, Labor needs to keep up and change tactics to match.

30 years ago, if you wanted to drive an NYC taxi, you had to take classes and pass tests and buy a medallion and jump through a bunch of hoops and get exploited before you could drive.

Now, if you want to drive an Uber in NYC, you download an app, fill out a form, upload some documents, pass a background check, and you can start driving within days. Big tech didn’t worry about the rules, made it way more convenient, and won. But you’ll still get exploited by them.

If you want to start a Union today, you still have to do all the same stuff as you did 30 years ago, collecting signatures and scheduling votes and agreeing to do nothing if you lose by 1 vote. There are some apps that can make some of the grunt work digital, but they suck and still make you follow the same rules, and take forever, and companies know exactly how to counter it while it’s in early stages.

I’m saying labor needs to make it as easy as becoming an Uber driver in the sense of using digital tools in new ways to blast through obsolete rules that have become a hindrance, and coordinate individuals behind the scenes without asking for permission first.

If only 43% of workers will sign union cards or vote yes, then it’s over? "Let’s try again next year. :frowning: "

Why is that? If only 43% of workers went on strike, the company would still be in traction and the workers who didn’t strike would have a bad day. The strikers wouldn’t have legal protection, but they basically don’t right now anyway, as Cory wrote in Firing the refs doesn’t end the game. (though Wilcox has been reinstated by the courts and that ruling is under appeal)

It should be easier and faster to organize, and it could be decentralized, and partial successes could drive immediate action, without having to wait for rounds and rounds of voting and approval and getting permission from the boss first.

But you are correct, this all requires someone credible to be persuasive and make the case publicly. The amount of buy-in by workers would have to be pretty high, even if I think it could be effective at less than 50%. There need to be leaders without ulterior motives. My mind jumps to Bernie and AOC. They are on tour and have a pretty big audience. I don’t know if they are putting forward new strategies that can disrupt the status quo in favor or labor, though.

Maybe they could get tech support from some of the devs who Trump fired from the United States Digital Service before it was gutted and converted, like a re-animated zombie, into DOGE.

9

We mostly agree but this seems a bit optimistic to me:

«these devs are either dear friends with, or are themselves, queer, racial minorities, women who want reproductive rights, etc. And they are not necessarily going to sit by while 60 years of social progress is reversed on those fronts.»

Because identity politics aligns “creative genius” techies even more strongly with the interests of their bosses who know very well that identity politics is wonderful at splitting workers into small grievance groups focused away from economic issues, and results usually just in redistribution of jobs among workers.

Also the issue that Cory Doctorow discusses in this post is worker economic issues, not identity rights, and as to that the “creative geniuses” want their delivery drivers, their apartment cleaners, their restaurant workers, their gardeners, to be as “affordable” as possible.

PS: As to this:
«I definitely wasn’t trying to say you should be able to order labor rights on doordash. […] I’m saying labor needs to make it as easy as becoming an Uber driver in the sense of using digital tools in new ways to blast through obsolete rules»

The point here is that “digital tools” are not going to make the difference and organizing workers is not like buying using Groupon.com or setting up a Discord chat room, it is a lot harsher and more dangerous. What has always made the difference is the willingness of workers to fight hard and make sacrifices to achieve labor rights because investors use dirty and nasty methods to smash those who want labor rights because “winners do whatever it takes” is their leading principle.

10

«The “bulk headcount” jobs have been already offshored to places where there is a long queue of workers with a non-prestigious degree begging for a tech job. Tech employers like Amazon, Microsoft, etc. often have 10 offshore tech workers for every one in the USA.»

Also when tech employers want to hire some “bulk headcounts” in the USA they prefer to get immigrants on indentured visas (like H1-B), easily disposed of, and of which there is a large oversupply.

https://www.cfr.org/blog/compete-china-united-states-needs-fix-immigration
“international students at U.S. universities not only boost science research (they make up 74 percent of electrical engineering students and 72 percent of computer and information science students”

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-06-05/tech-immigrants-a-map-of-silicon-valleys-imported-talent
“One third of the startups in Silicon Valley are founded by Indian Americans. in 2010, Asian
Americans became the majority of the tech workforce in the Valley for the first time, making up 50.1% vs. 40.7% for whites. In 2012, 51 percent of the Valley’s population spoke a language other than English exclusively at home, compared with 21 percent in the U.S.”

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-08-06/why-silicon-valley-s-asian-americans-still-feel-like-a-minority
“Pichai, who’s originally from southern India, leads a company where more than 40% of the U.S. workforce is Asian. […] At Facebook Inc., the figure is even higher, and Asian employees slightly outnumber White ones. […] At Facebook, where 46% of U.S. workers are Asian, only 26% are director-level or higher”

That is a lot of amazing diversity, considering that asians are less than 5% of the USA population. Another example of amazing diversity is the composition of the tech teams developing DALL-E at OpenAI.com:

https://openai.com/index/dall-e-3/
“Credits

  • Core research and execution
    Gabriel Goh, James Betker, Li Jing, Aditya Ramesh
  • Research contributors—primary
    Tim Brooks, Jianfeng Wang, Lindsey Li, Long Ouyang, Juntang Zhuang, Joyce Lee, Prafulla Dhariwal, Casey Chu, Joy Jiao
  • Research contributors—secondary
    Jong Wook Kim, Alex Nichol, Yang Song, Lijuan Wang, Tao Xu
  • Inference optimization
    Connor Holmes, Arash Bakhtiari, Umesh Chand, Zhewei Yao, Samyam Rajbhandari, Yuxiong He”

Their degree backrounds are also amazingly diverse: Stanford, Berkeley, MIT, and even NYU and OSU…

11

This topic was automatically closed after 15 days. New replies are no longer allowed.