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Big Technology
Amazon delivery drivers and liberal city dwellers vote together. But for how long?
In his new book, Fulfillment, Alec MacGillis writes of an Amazon distribution center in Sparrows Point, Maryland that sits on land once occupied by a Bethlehem Steel plant. The story underscores how dramatically the U.S. economy has transformed in recent years. Instead of making things, many of our biggest companies now distribute things made elsewhere. We’ve moved from an economy of production to one of dispersion.
The shift from factory to fulfillment work is core to the American story right now. For the American worker, a factory job like one at Bethlehem Steel was dangerous, but it paid $30 to…
Google engineers and other workers at the company announced on Monday that they’ve formed a minority union. The Alphabet Workers Union represents more than 225 workers out of 260,000-plus at the company, the New York Times reported.
“There are those who would want you to believe that organizing in the tech industry is completely impossible… If you don’t have unions in the tech industry, what does that mean for our country?” Sara Steffens, secretary-treasurer of the Communications Workers of America, the larger union that Google’s will be affiliated with, told the Times.
‘This complaint makes clear that workers have the right to speak to issues of ethical business and the composition of management’
Google illegally surveilled and fired employees for participating in organizing efforts last year, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) said in a complaint filed on Wednesday.
The complaint alleges that the technology giant violated labor laws after spying on, interrogating, and terminating employees Laurence Berland and Kathryn Spiers, both former engineers at Google’s San Francisco office.
Last November, Berland was suspended after publicly opposing Google’s stance on the use of its technology by government agencies. He was fired later that month after organizing employees against the company’s hiring of union-busting firm IRI Consultants, which Googlers learned of from their colleagues’…
The biggest startups in modern history were built on old-fashioned worker exploitation. Time for an upgrade.
Uber is less a business than a constellation of fantasies. The same goes for Lyft.
Early on, Uber and Lyft positioned themselves as “ridesharing” companies that were a key part of the buzzword-emblazoned “sharing economy.” Uber offered luxury on demand, and Lyft claimed to be a fun, environmentally friendly alternative to taxis. Both sold themselves as efficient and city-friendly and promised to help cut down on miles traveled. That was a fantasy that evaporated before the first pink Lyft mustaches fell off the bumpers. …
A law firm webinar advised employers on how to avoid becoming a target of CODE, an organizing initiative in tech and video game industries
On July 30, the employment and labor law firm Jackson Lewis put on a one-hour webinar designed to educate employers on a new threat: a wave of union organizing in the video game and technology industries. More specifically, it promised to teach them to defend against it.
The webinar, called “Breaking the CODE: Union Organizing in the Video Game and Technology Industries,” focused on a group called Campaign to Organize Digital Employees (CODE) that was formed in January 2020 by the Communications Workers of America (CWA). CODE won its first campaign in March when it successfully organized employees at the…
Employee survey platforms allow employers to sort groups of employees by the departments, locations, and demographics most likely to unionize
In April, Business Insider reported that Whole Foods kept tabs on stores likely to unionize through an interactive heat map based on scores derived from more than two dozen metrics. A June Vox story about Amazon’s workforce describes a similar heat map, with executives keeping tabs on potential unionization “hot spots” via a calculation that relied on employee survey data, timing of the last pay raise, and dozens of other factors.
But Amazon isn’t the only company doing this sort of work. Thanks to a glut of tech platforms that deploy sophisticated methods for collecting and analyzing employee data, pinpointing…
The company’s internal uprising is unusual in uniting a spectrum of workers
On Friday, Amazon technology employees will be staging a “virtual” sick-out (remote corporate workers won’t be signing in for the day) to protest the company’s handling of the coronavirus safety measures at fulfillment centers. The action is planned by Amazon Employees for Climate Justice and is also a response to Amazon’s firing of two employees last Tuesday for publicly denouncing its actions around Covid-19.
Several months into the coronavirus crisis, Amazon has solidified its “essential” status as much of the world relies on delivery services for everything from food to exercise bikes. …
A surge of protests has demanded safer conditions during the coronavirus pandemic. But will they make a difference?
Stories about working conditions in Amazon’s warehouses — and efforts by Amazon’s warehouse workers to change those conditions — stretch back nearly a decade. But like other systemic crises, Amazon workers’ fight for dignity and safer jobs has been greatly amplified by the coronavirus pandemic. With a rising count of warehouse workers confirmed infected with the coronavirus—at least 153 cases across 65 warehouses worldwide—and nine walkouts and shutdowns around the world, the urgency of this fight has become far more evident.
The activism of Amazon workers in recent weeks feels different than previous organizing efforts. Workers seem to be more…
Into the Valley
OneZero conducted a 10,000-person poll to shed light on the plight of H-1B workers
This article is part of Into the Valley, a feature series from OneZero about Silicon Valley, the people who live there, and the technology they create.
In 2010, Alex left a “pretty small country in Asia” to study computer science at one of America’s elite universities. Alex, who requested anonymity due to the sensitive nature of this story, eventually caught the eye of Microsoft, which sponsored their H-1B visa. …
Into the Valley
Inside an unprecedented surge of activism in the tech industry
This article is part of Into the Valley, a feature series from OneZero about Silicon Valley, the people who live there, and the technology they create.
On November 1, 2018, thousands of Google workers streamed out of offices across the world holding signs with messages reading “not ok Google,” and “worker’s rights are women’s rights.” In Mountain View, New York City, Dublin, Tokyo, and Singapore, protestors pushed back against the sense that Google was protecting executives credibly accused of sexual harassment.
Seeing tech workers, a group that had long been considered “unorganizable,” flood the streets in protest was something new…
