they got their headlines, so it works

they probably don’t want to be accountable for serious damage claims. They do it for people’s attention. To materially disrupt data center construction you need a lot more than a single action

yep, it’s one of the new chapters and it’s pretty active and growing fast. You should join.

you can volunteer in some alt-albor organization that supports unions externally, like Tech Workers Coalition: https://techworkerscoalition.org/

you can unionize with the rest of the workers. They are called “wall to wall unions” when you do not organize by department/profession but by company. In some countries they are the norm.

that’s why you do union organizing with organizers and not with edgy teenagers.

both coops and unionized companies operate within a capitalist structure and on the market (usually). Neither model can emancipate itself from its context. So I’m not sure about what aspect you expect to be different. And coops can be run with good governance where power structures are explicit, managed and democratically altered to reflect the values of the members. The case where you have few people controlling everything is a dysfunction, it’s not part of the model (and also can happen with unions).

are you thinking of a cooperative?

join tech workers coalition or no tech for apartheid. There’s a lot of behind the scene work they do at a global level that doesn’t require any exposure

well, from where else should come the power to interject with the company’s plans if not from forming unions? Like what does it mean to hold a company accountable if you have no leverage? Quitting and making a post on social media about it?

because these statements are instrumental to building power. They are not a draft of a negotiation proposal. They are a galvanizing message for workers, not a formal demand. Without power, formal demands are pointless. To build power, clarity, concreteness and directness beats idealism, rigour and formalism every day.

I’ve been in tech labor organizing for 8 years at this point. I know written documents matter pretty much nothing for organizing, let alone tech workers organizing. And yes, tech workers need a simple language.

The statement you’ve written is very good to argue on the internet, but it closes any avenue for picking winnable issues in the real world. If the original one sets a clear, achievable goal (canceling a new contract), the one you wrote prevents any kind of realistic demand and sets an unachievable goal for a newly formed union.

If you speak a language workers don’t understand, you increase the cognitive load and lower interest and participation. It’s a trade-off and it’s an ineliminabile part of the game. Being correct and being useful are two different things

It’s labor organizing, not intellectual engagement. The point is to build power in the company, not argue about vocabulary. Words are instrumental, they are not the goal.

The author is Italian teaching in Canada. While it’s true that in the USA democratic structures in the workplace are less common than elsewhere, I think the author is presenting the phenomenon in a rethorical fashion to motivate workers to fight the new forms of Authorian control in the workplace.

are you behind a VPN? Because disconnecting from my VPN it started working again.

as if leftists behaved any better

did you ever organize a strike in a big company?

The Free Software movement over the last 30+ years failed at every single one of their political goals. It’s effectively a political zombie which sometimes produces barely usable software for nerds. I know perfectly well what they advocated because at some point I was close to fall for it (more than 15 years ago), but it’s delusional dogmatism. The world moved on and the FOSS movement failed so bad that their enemies are now in control of an Imperial fascist government.

You’re responsible for the technology you create. Unconstrained freedom is more often than not the freedom of the powerful to oppress the weak. Anything else is techbro ideology. FOSS ideology and techno-fascist ideology have the same roots in the freedom of information.

My call to action is unrelated to technological production, because technology doesn’t solve social problems. Unionize workers in Microsoft. If you really want, build software to facilitate the construction and deployment of worker power, and stop playing around with the liberation of software. As long as it’s “Free Software” instead of “Free people” you’re playing on the side of the tech oligarchy.