Unions
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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…
For worker movements, digital tools are a double-edged sword
Willy Solis describes himself as someone who never dreamed of being an activist. Last year, the 41-year-old Texan began working for Shipt, a grocery delivery app owned by Target that relies on tens of thousands of gig workers to complete fast, “personalized” deliveries in more than 260 cities across the United States. Shipt sports the airy, pastel positivity shared by many technology startups. As Shippers go about their jobs, Shipt encourages them to embody its corporate mantra: “Bring the Magic.”
But in recent months, Solis grew disenchanted by payment changes that caused many Shipt workers like him to earn less…
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…
The current wave of tech-worker protests isn’t without precedent
One of the most remarkable accomplishments of the strike that took place at Boeing in 2000 wasn’t getting more than 15,000 white-collar workers to walk off the job, it was getting a bunch of engineers to agree on one thing, jokes Stan Sorscher, a former Boeing employee and retired labor representative for the Society of Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace (SPEEA).
“If you asked engineers ‘What’s the boiling point of water?’, I’m not sure you’d get 97% of them to agree,” he says. “They’d say, ‘Well, wait, what else did you do? Are there any impurities in the water?’”
But…
Kathryn Spiers says she was fired after calling attention to Google’s contract with a ‘union busting’ labor relations firm
Several weeks after Google terminated four workers for allegedly violating its policies around accessing internal documents, the technology giant has fired another employee who participated in workplace organizing.
The employee, Kathryn Spiers, wrote in a Medium post on Tuesday that she was fired from Google’s Platform Security team on Friday for calling attention to its contract with “union busting” labor relations firm IRI Consultants.
Spiers, who worked at Google’s Sunnyvale, California office for nearly two years, built a pop-up window that, when Googlers visited IRI’s website, would appear on their screens with a message that said they had a “right…
Grim stories of unpaid overtime and sexism have workers organizing for change
For those of us who grew up swapping Pokémon with classmates and strategizing how to defeat bosses late into the night with friends, making video games is a dream job. But the reality of working in the industry is different. Careers in the video game industry can be very rewarding, but there’s also a dark side that’s finally getting the attention it deserves — and workers are organizing to change it.
In the past few years, journalists have reported shocking stories about the work environments at game studios around the world. Crunch is an industry term that refers to a…
A Republican-dominated agency argues that allowing organizers to use company email is impinging on companies’ First Amendment rights
David Galvan’s job is typically either hard, or very hard. As the lone full-time organizer for the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 304 — the largest electrical workers’ union in Kansas — he is tasked with starting new unions in industries ranging from rural gas service to power line construction, and building support when it’s time for renegotiating a contract for the roughly 2,500 workers he represents. He needs to be able to talk to union members, meet the new guys, and convince everyone that a union is worth fighting for.
But he’s often faced with a problem: reaching…
