did you ever organize a strike in a big company?

You live in a world of fantasy. Fascists are taking over the whole of the West. Do something about it and stop larping.

You’re fetishizing Non-Westeners because the strategy you want to use work there and not here, and instead of changing strategy, you project yourself into a different context. The article is clearly about the Global North, for which what you described has failed over and over. You make politics with the people you have, not with the people you would like to have. Blaming workers for not being receptive to your strategies is delusional.

for me it is freely accessible. I didn’t know there was a paywall

Not sure what kind of humans you know, but nobody likes for a stranger to get there, push their political opinions, call it science, say it’s for their good, and imply you know fuckshit in the process. It’s fine for edgy debates on the internet, but it doesn’t fly to build relationships in the real world. Especially if on the other side there’s somebody saying “You’re fine as you are, come with me, I will make you rich.”

For the same reason we don’t use tractors in union organizing, we also don’t use AI.

because your coworkers are more likely not leftist and talking about ideological points doesn’t bring them on your side. The workplace is not an internet leftist theory chat.

software, beyond Excel, doesn’t really help with unionizing in any meaningful way. Why would you think of applying AI would do something?

That’s contradictory with the direct experience of most workers, where AI is something forced upon them by managers and that creates more problem than it solves. The minority using agentic AI is also probably harder to organize, so better relate to the majority that is discontent than the minority that is vibe-coding.

yeah, and now they understood it’s an existential threat and they are moving away. Real money is pouring to switch as fast as possible. Not saying it’s good or done properly or serving the people of Europe, but the politicians have finally began to freak out about this stuff, also because it’s a lot of money to be made.

You just discovered Marxists’ way of writing. If they concerned themselves with specific contexts rather than general rules, we would have Communism by now. Instead we have a lot of analysis.

Jokes aside, I think this article should be framed as a response to the recent European discourse (and piles of money) about ditching US infrastructure, which is generating several articles like this one.

quitting doesn’t halt the baby-grinding machine. Big tech can only be stopped from the inside. I even know some people getting hired there exclusively to cause trouble. You should respect their commitment rather than anything else.

since botting is so easy, probably they used a lot of accounts to access data that, in theory, is somewhat public. I mean, in an ideal world in which engineers have infinite time sure, they would have noticed, but I do investigations on platform apps for work and trust me, they miss a lot of more fundamental stuff.

spotify has a whole economy of bots signing up, uploading fake songs listened by other bots and earning lot of money in the process. I know several people living out of this. A little army of scraper bots is definitely not what they should be the most concerned about.

People don’t use forums anymore. Union organizing requires big numbers and being comfortable with being visible.

The URL shortener for sure could be addressed and I invite you to join and contribute to improve that part of the stack. Nonetheless, TWC is not a hacker space or a space for tech experts. You need to use the tools people already use and meet them where they are at. Using niche tools people are not familiar with introduces friction and barriers, that filter out people without tech skills, or without the attention and time to learn a new tool and incorporate it in their routines. Most tech workers are not programmers, remember that. Also people who are too privacy-focused and tech-focused tend to be bad organizers: union organizing implies risks and exposure, and you have to be comfortable with that, while privacy-focused people want to minimize individual risk by staying hidden. For sure privacy of your communication from the employer or the government plays an important role, because it might give sensitive information to your enemy, but if retaining privacy prevents you from having impact, it’s pointless to even start.

I’m part of TWC and the organization of this call and I’m Italian. There are different timezones but it’s obviously hard to include all of them. Including UTC wouldn’t help most people.

The very fact that there are two events for two distinct timezones doesn’t suggest there’s an attempt to reach out to a bigger crowd?

Because self-hosting adds complexity and friction, something that impact-oriented organizations might not be able to afford. TWC uses self hosting on more sensitive data anyway, just not on these tools.

The Global chapter of Tech Workers Coalition

The Session A time zone is good for Europeans too. Session B I guess could work for East Asia.

Why do you see this as USA-only?

No union in the world asks rates that high. You’ve been probably have been served some kind of management union busting material if you have ever seen a number that high. 3% is considered very high already.

Anyway AWU is not necessarily trying to bargain for higher wages, but they do work on better job security, better working environments, fairness against abuses, sexual harassment and similar stuff, and obviously they support the political work of anti-genocide groups within Google.

There’s always a reason to join a union if you’re a worker.