This episode features audio from the book event Against Tech Oligarchy: Worker Resistance in the World's Most Powerful Industry. It features a discussion with the book's authors J.S. Tan and Clarissa Redwine, moderated by Nikhil Singh.
Announcer 0:01
Welcome to Engelberg Center Live, a collection of audio from events held by the Engelberg Center on Innovation, Law, and Policy at NYU Law. This episode features audio from the book event "Against Tech Oligarchy: Worker Resistance in the World's Most Powerful Industry." It features a discussion with the book's authors, J.S. Tan and Clarissa Redwine, moderated by Nikhil Singh.
J.S. Tan 0:27
All right, hi everyone. So my name is J.S. J.S. Tan, and I'm one of the co-authors of of this new book against tech oligarchy. It's a book that we wrote over the past two years, it's really been a project of of maybe a decade, though, where we sort of draw on our experiences of organizing the tech sector, which is where I initially worked coming out of college, and and have since moved beyond the tech industry, or rather back into academia, and I'm now doing a PhD at MIT.
Clarissa Redwine 1:06
Hey everyone, I'm Clarissa Redwine. I'm co-author of this book with JS. We've worked together for a very long time organizing in the tech industry at different shops, and yeah, I started my journey as a tech worker. I joined Kickstarter specifically, a very radical little company that believes in giving communities the power to bring projects to life that they want to see in the world. That was a little nugget of nudging me into this work. And while I was there, we started a union drive and actually won the first wall-to-wall union in the tech industry. And I've been organizing ever since.
Nikhil Singh 1:52
I'm Nikhil Singh, and I'm a professor here at NYU in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis and History. And Clarissa and JS generously invited me to be part of the conversation with them today, so I'll just say a couple things about how I thought we would proceed. So they'll both say some remarks about the book, whatever they want to say. I'll say a couple things about the book, and then maybe pose some questions to them to get it started, and then we'll open it up for your questions, as I'm sure you have many, and we'll try to have it this be a little bit more of a back and forth rather than a series of talks. Okay. Okay.
Clarissa Redwine 2:34
Yeah. Yeah. So I think a good place to start is a couple years back, JS and I were supporting an underground union drive at Twitter just before Elon Musk took over, and we were advocating for a very specific strategy that many tech organizers were also following, which in our book we term the recognition playbook. This is where workers build a majority of support across the workplace and go for an election or push for recognition for their employer and essentially get permission to sit at the bargaining table with their boss before winning any material gain, that was the strategy that we were building toward. But Elon Musk joined the company, took over, and changed all of our plans. You know, he decimated our union drive. He laid off 80 percent of the workers. He even froze the code base when he heard that we were organizing a strike. These, this was a level of antagonism we had not experienced prior, and it made us reflect on the reckoning that maybe our strategies could not meet this moment. And you know, after that, we tried several more times to get campaigns running in a much more hostile tech industry that was very anti-worker after mass layoffs. And again and again, we were seeing this playbook that we really believed in fail. Not only us, but our workers that we were supporting, and that was when we took a step back and said, "Okay, let's reflect. Let's think about what we've actually been doing in the tech industry to build worker power.
J.S. Tan 4:19
Yeah, that's a great anecdote to sort of open us up with. I'm just curious in this crowd, who has heard of the term, the tech worker movement? Oh, okay, quite a few. There's some crowds where where that number is is much lower, but and and in some crowds, tech folks mainly, it's probably much higher, but that's a good number. And so, you know, I ask that because because the tech worker movement is is basically what you know the story of the tech worker movement is basically what our book is about. You know, we give this portrait of this movement chronicling. Its rise, why it was that tech workers first started organizing, and how and how in the process of organizing this movement ended up transforming the politics of Silicon Valley, and so you know, I when I think of the Silicon Valley of today compared to that of 10 years ago, I see sort of two big changes. The first being a drastic change in sort of the working conditions of tech work and the leverage that tech workers have. So you know when when I when I joined the industry, this was kind of you know people referred to it as the good days of tech, right? We were we were showered with perks. We had wellness walks. You could do a laundry in the office. We we
Clarissa Redwine 5:47
had to delete the phrase "gone are the days" from this book so many times because of that.
J.S. Tan 5:52
Because in fact, gone are those days, and and today, you know, the the sort of working conditions in the tech sector is is very different, right? Compensation still very high in in many parts of the sector, but now it's much more about grind culture, right? Hustle culture. You know, 996 comes from China to the U.S. right? 996 being this kind of work regime of working 9 a.m. to 9 p.m6. days a week, and and paired with that is is a very different posture in how tech bosses treat their workers, right? You know, constantly sort of constant layoffs in the industry. Tech workers always now at this point afraid of being pipped. Pipped as a performance improvement plan, and so the working conditions have changed drastically. Okay, the second major change is is the politics of Silicon Valley, which I'm sure you know has not has not gone missed by by many people. Right, there's been a major shift from sort of a coalition of the tech elite with the Democratic Party to now them aligning much more closely with Trump and and the sort of politics of MAGA and you know independently there are many ways to explain these two these two phenomenon right we can sort of point to sort of the change in the financial environment we can talk about later. We could point to sort of the kind of the the you know for for the tech elites the sort of tumultuous era of of the Joe Biden administration and maybe that causing them to to to to go further away from the Democratic Party. But what our book really tries to do is tell this story of these changes in Silicon Valley, through the lens of class struggle, and through the lens of how it was that workers fought for power, and and and and in turn, the ways in which the tech bosses had responded to that. And so, you know, that's to maybe maybe complement Clarissa's sort of opening anecdotes sort of give a more higher level picture of of sort of the you know what our book is about.
Nikhil Singh 8:09
Okay, so there's how many people have read the book in this room? Not many yet. It came out today. Which is normal. Which is normal for a book talk, by the way. So I'm not. That's not meant to be to make anyone feel bad at all. I'm just trying to decide how much we need to say, you know, about what's in the book, because I think the the thing about this book, and I will say a few things about why I think this book is important for us to read right now. And I think authors often have trouble at the moment they finish a book, especially when they're humble and they're kind of committed to the public good of like sort of saying why this book is so important. But I think this book is really important for a couple of reasons. One, one, I mean, in some ways I'm going to elaborate what's already been said. But the whole kind of the tech industry has been the kind of condensation point in which the politics, economics, and culture of this entire country has turned in the last 10 years, and I think we can see many aspects of what we've been dealing with in different parts of our sort of political and economic life through the lens that J.S. and Clarissa provide here, and in many ways, they're telling a story on two levels. They're telling a general story about the transformation of the tech industry from a from what we thought of as a kind of progressive milieu into a reactionary milieu, and that's at both the kind of cultural level and the economic level. So, the economic level, it's a story of how tech went from being kind of you know the knowledge economy was going to be different. It was going to be teamwork. It was not going to be focused always on the bottom line. It was going to be driven by sort of post materialist values. It was going to deliver us eventually from work itself to becoming. Really, just clearly, just another capitalist industry driven by the bottom line, driven by austerity politics, driven by a kind of networked relationship to all the worst aspects of our state, particularly the military-industrial information complex. So that story, right, in some ways runs through the book. It's a kind of chronicle of the last 10 years of a kind of a big story, but it's a big story that's being told through a very specific, a much more specific story of tech worker organizing, and here I think the the tech worker organizing story is really really interesting for us because it raises questions about the specific place of workers within this industry, in both sort of enabling and also combating these transformations. Right? It's it's a story about knowledge economy workers and what role we. I think it can be extended to people in the university and other arenas of society we have to play in the kind of struggles of our time right and where that gets complicated I think is that knowledge economy workers are often relatively privileged they're often better remunerated. They're often imbued with a more kind of individualistic ethos. They often don't occupy a single workspace or workplace. They often are told by their bosses that they're part of a kind of a guild or a family, even or an enterprise that is mission-driven and therefore not subject to the same sort of calculations of kind of kind of exploitation and and kind of bossism, right? And all of that is part of what's falling away for tech workers during during this period that Clarissa and JS talk about. So, in some ways, I think the story that they tell is not a particularly uplifting one, and I think this is something that you can both talk about a little bit more because I think we're also now maybe at a different moment from the moment when you wrote the book. So you may have things to say about what we see going forward that are different from how you felt at the moment you finished the book. But in some ways, the book is the story is a story about the defeat of tech worker organizing.
Nikhil Singh 12:36
But in other ways, I think more importantly, it's a story about the lessons learned from the tech worker struggles, and here is where I kind of want you to open this out for us in the conversation, and maybe we can start to have a little bit more of a back and forth about it, because I think one of the things that really struck me about the organizing efforts is is that, and I you can correct me if I'm wrong about this, but it strikes me that the organizing efforts often do not begin from the standpoint that we often think of workers' organization and workers' struggles beginning, like struggles over wages and hours, they end up being struggles that are motivated by other questions. And I think one of the struggles that you begin the book with is the the mobilization against Google's Project Maven, right? Which is essentially the moment in which it's it becomes clear that Google is collaborating with the military, and that that is a a source of tremendous disquiet in the rank and file workforce. And there are of course many other examples throughout your book that that the the move to workplace organizing really begins not necessarily from the the moment of kind of trying to improve your position in the workplace per se, that that almost comes later. That the struggle really begins with a sense of what is the purpose of what we do in this arena, right? And and I think that's where there's a kind of a kind of a contradiction that you're wrestling with, because as you then move, or as the as workers then move to gain more leverage and control in the workplace, more organization, and ally with established international unions like the United Electrical Workers or the Communication Workers, or as I did when I was a graduate student with the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Union (HERE) you start to have a kind of a kind of disjunction between the specific kind of. Orientations you have as workers within a knowledge economy context, and the typical union strategies and questions that are important and that become part of your training as organizers, because they're giving you the recognition playbook and sort of teaching you in some ways how to organize in the workplace, but then you sort of find something starts to kind of drift or disconnect, right? And I think you you talk a lot about that, and I'd like to hear you you say more about that because you end the book with a kind of provocative call to Democratize the tech industry, and democratizing the tech industry sounds like something really different from just organizing tech workers, right? It sounds like a kind of a bigger, a bigger challenge, and one that is relevant to all of us ultimately, but one in which tech workers have a special role to play as people who not only are in that industry but also with a kind of close-up view of how it works, right? So I'll stop there and circle back probably to a few more specific questions that I have and give you a chance to respond.
Clarissa Redwine 16:22
I'll let JS go first, but that was amazing. We're going to take you on the rest of the tour. Thank you so much for that. Yeah, go for it.
J.S. Tan 16:30
Yeah, I mean, I I think you know this point that you're getting at of of sort of calling for rethinking the tech worker movement and in fact, the strategies that we use is really a main, you know, is really a central part of our book. You know, I spoke a little bit about sort of this higher level story that we're telling, but you know, at the core of it is it's a labor story and it's a story about a movement, and so you know, analyzing the strategies of the tech worker movement is is really key. To to maybe give some context, it's it's worth going back. I think to to how the tech worker movement started. You know, the tech worker movement started primarily in the years 2017, 2018. This was a time in which a lot of tech workers, you know, myself included, was coming into the tech sector, you know, kind of with these ideas that the tech sector was going to be a place in which, you know, we could help build a more democratic, more open society, and and and what we realized when we ended up working in the tech sector was that a lot of what was actually happening was that these companies were, you know, intensifying misinformation or contracting with the Pentagon to build software for the military or working with ICE, so on and so forth. And and this became sort of the initial impetus in many ways for why a lot of tech workers became disillusioned and wanted to to start political activism within the tech sector. So this, in this context, the kinds of strategies that we took up as tech workers primarily relied on tarnishing what was, you know, up until then mostly a pretty clean and and and pristine brand of these tech companies, and so our strategy really relied on public pressure approaches. We we use things like the open letter, right? We sort of organize big showy walkouts. You know, we sort of organize protests at shareholder meetings, and and and this became a very at least initially a very useful way to to push back against these tech companies and get our demands met because a lot of these companies at that time relied on, on a business model that, you know, ultimately they were sort of consumer platforms, right? So there was this kind of natural coalition between their business models and and the consumer base. But towards the end of the 2010s, what became increasingly part of their business models was working with enterprises, working in cloud computing. Right, that was the division I worked in at Microsoft. Right, I was on the cloud division where we were sort of on the front lines of seeing these contracts with, you know, the Pentagon, with ICE, so on and so forth, these big oil companies, and and so eventually over time, our our strategies in organizing had to change. Right, we couldn't continue relying on this kind of public pressure approach, especially at a time when when many of the bosses in the tech industry were were also getting fed up. With tech workers, you know, penning another open letter and and sort of you know putting them on blast in the New York Times or in Washpo, right? And so this became a moment in which in which a lot of members of the tech worker movement started looking for new ways to organize, and this was a time where where Clarissa, at this time Clarissa was working at Kickstarter, and I'll let her talk a bit more about that in a second. Tech workers at at Kickstarter ended up organizing the first successful union in the tech sector, and and they did so at a time in which a lot of the movement was looking for this new approach in organizing, and so when we saw the the victory of Kickstarter, what a lot of us ended up gravitating towards was this exact strategy of organizing unions as our new north star of of the tech worker movement, and that was what we did.
J.S. Tan 20:58
Clarissa ended up getting fired for organizing at Kickstarter, but her and I teamed up and we spent really many many years together trying to push this agenda to the tech industry to get this idea out that yes, tech workers not only deserve a union, but actually what we need to do right now is to organize unions and get recognition legally in order to get our demands met, and so you know that became our work for many years. And what we realized in in sort of doing this work for years, I mean, eventually working as staffers for an international was that there was a fundamental mismatch between the the sort of organizing approaches that that you know we were advocating for under U.S. labor law that we were sort of taught from sort of the classics of labor organizing from folks like Jane McAlvey or you know these various trainings that that international unions promote. What we saw was a fundamental mismatch on of these strategies and the tech labor process. And so, you know, one example of this is is the the sort of traditional the traditional approach of exercising workers' leverage in in most other sectors is to withhold your labor, right? You want to go on strike, and the way you go on strike is you is you is you get the vast majority of your bargaining unit of the workforce signed up to participate in the strike, and and ideally when you go on strike for one, two, maybe three days, that will that will do so much damage to the to the bottom line of of the employer that they are that they will be forced to come to the table and cede to your demands. But in tech, the sort of daily work of the software engineer, you know, the product designer, the data scientist is precisely to automate for their employers the generation of profits, right? So you know what we saw in our in our experience was that there was this fundamental, you know, incompatibility in the strategies, and and so you know part of why we've written this book is is actually to sort of go back and and sort of take stock of the various you know approaches that tech workers use to to to push back against their bosses and also to reflect and and really try to diagnose why it was that over you know the many years that we've been organizing and and speaking with many of our peers in the in you know who are also trying to organize in tech sector? Why there has been so much failure?
Clarissa Redwine 23:46
Yeah, yeah. Beyond beyond getting to the point where a couple of shops in the tech industry went on strike and the platforms didn't go down. That, like JS was saying, there was like a fundamental mismatch between the idea of going out on the picket line and actually hurting your employer's bottom line. Beyond that, when we looked at how the tech industry, how the tech worker movement got started, we realized that every strong union drive in the tech industry started with the moment of class conflict, where workers decided that they were going to defend the interests of the working class over their bosses, usually defending their mission, like like for instance at Google, the workers pushed back against Project Maven, believing that you know building technology for the military was not, you know, aligned with quote don't be evil, right? This happened over and over again in the tech worker movement, and so we we saw that there was this connection between workers experiencing class conflict and the development of class. Consciousness, where they see themselves on one side and their employers, their bosses, management on the other side, and that was what drove a lot of interest in building unions in the tech industry to begin with. And what we noticed in both our time organizing, but also in our time really thinking about what went wrong, why we weren't able to pull off a strike that actually brought our platforms down, was that when we switched from direct action, like JS was talking about, where people wrote open letters, you know, did walkouts, when we moved to the recognition playbook, where instead we were slowly, usually underground, building up majority support so that we could gain recognition and sit at the bargaining table. That process would take years, sometimes outlasting the tenure of a tech worker at that company. So what it did in practice was delay the very sparks that started the movement in the first place, and and what we're trying to say in the book is that class conflict is essential for building strong organizing skills and also for building solidarity. And anyone has anyone gone on strike in this room? Yeah, I think anyone who's participated in that would tell you you're so much more gelled and tighter as a group of workers, and you feel like there's so much more possibility once you take that action with your coworkers. And so our our sort of invitation to tech workers, is you need to practice in order to learn how to actually put pressure on your boss. And the good news is, practicing in itself is what builds strong organizers and strong unions.
Nikhil Singh 26:57
So I'm going to just like take one more round with you, and then maybe we'll open it up then, because I think there's like a few different strands to tease out here. So one strand is the method of organizing, right? So on the one hand, you have sort of the open letter kind of, and the and the the patient sort of face to face, identifying the grievances people have in their very particular locations within the workplace, and then trying to kind of get everyone to align. Right, and I I think that maybe it's important not to think of those as opposed strategies, but complementary ones. And I think that's kind of what you're saying. I mean, maybe it starts with the open letter and moves to the and the kind of walkout and moves to the the kind of the kind of sense that we need to sort of work on the ground to organize our workplace. But even at the very end of the book, you come back and the New York Times workers kind of kick off their organizing with yet another question about content moderation and the Tom Cotton editorial and the upheaval in the newsroom. That's really about values, right? So it's like you can't really separate out the values question from the kind of primary economic workplace questions. I mean, I think that's part of what your book is is is teaching us about organizing in this moment, and maybe not just in the tech industry, maybe more broadly, actually. But I think, especially in the tech industry, in so far as the other story, the general story you're telling, is how tech is becoming more and more integrated with the state, and specifically the surveillance state, the military state, the kind of police state, those those elements of the of state power that are now inextricable from from from tech work, right? And so, how can tech organizing be just about the workplace? It's actually about the entire orientation of our state and society in this moment, right? And that's what makes it both so big and also so daunting. And it obviously means it's something you can't do by yourself in the workplace. You have to do it also through broader appeals to the public, right? To the public good, to the public interest, right? And that's where things get tricky, right? Because you protesting against Google and Project Maven, protesting against the Dan Moore letter, protesting against calls to call in the military to discipline Black Lives Matter protesters. You know, I mean, this is what Musk would call the the woke mind virus, right? It's like the moment at which every single social cause becomes a cause for kind of public declamations and. Potentially, you know, work stoppages or workplace strife, right? And of course, you you rightly note how this is what's radicalizing a part of what's radicalizing the tech billionaires or the tech oligarchs, right? They see what's happening in their own workplaces, and they're like, we have to discipline these people. But the discipline isn't just about work discipline. It's also about ideological discipline, right? So one of my questions for you is sort of because you don't really go into this in the book. Is in reflecting back on this these moments, how how do we sort through? Because it's a real difficult question for us now politically. The relationship between these kind of different value orientations, that you know, around sexism, around racism, around workplace control, around militarism, around immigration policing, and then workplace organizing, where workers might have very tech workers might have differing differing views on some of these questions, they might not all align around a kind of antipathy to sexism, but they may really be strongly agreed on not wanting to do research for the military, or they may be not agreed on wanting to do research about research in the military, but they may think this particular issue is really important. Like one of the things that may has made workplace organizing work is the idea, and this is something unions always push.
Nikhil Singh 31:29
Right, is the idea that well, what we have in common is our work, so we can at least align on that, and we're not going to argue about abortion, and we're not going to argue about about questions of race, and we're not going to argue about the politics of the military or the politics of immigration. But what you're saying is these become unavoidable things to argue about because tech has its hand in all of them. You're actually doing the work of these things as coders, as engineers, as software designers, right? You can't actually get away from them, so it really produces a conundrum, right? That I don't think you you have resolved in the book, nor should you be able to resolve it. But I would love to hear you reflect on it because it does suggest to me something about the kind of next frontier of organizing, right? Like, like where do we go from here? You know how do we seize back control of these platforms, or, or abandon them, or sabotage them, or I mean, you know, don't quote me on that, but you know what what what is the what is the role, right? And especially I think to to get to something J.S. was kind of hinting at in his remarks, are not even really hinting at that that that that part of the the goal of big tech right now is to dispense with your work, right? To have you automate yourselves out of existence to to the greatest extent possible, right? So so so how do you then think about the the kind of the Pandora's box you've opened here, right? That I think is so important for us to wrestle with in this in this moment as you after you've finished this book, right, and kind of gone through these different these different kinds of struggles.
J.S. Tan 33:19
Wow,
Nikhil Singh 33:20
it's meant to be a hard question. That's a
J.S. Tan 33:22
hard question. That's that's a great question though, and I I think you know so at at a at an event that we were doing last night, there was one question that came in from the audience that asked us, okay, so you know you guys have talked a bit about the tech worker movement and and sort of the process of of class consciousness, but what about political consciousness? How should we think about political consciousness and and developing that? And it you know it stumped me for for a little bit, and I had to sort of like punt it to to Clarissa, who always has brilliant things to say, but as I was as as she was talking, it it occurred to me that was that that that question sort of poses a bit of a false dichotomy, because I think what we saw in our experience, both tracking and and closely observing and participating in the tech worker movement, was that the process of of gaining class consciousness and political consciousness are oftentimes closely tied together, and so I'll give you an example, right? So earlier I was talking about how why it was that tech workers started to organize and and sort of engage in what began as political activism in the workplace, right? Sort of protesting over, or you know, joining forces with the Me Too movement, or fighting for better sustainably practices at the company, and things things of that sort. And and so you know, this was. Also remember back in Trump one, right? So a lot of these issues fell along the lines of the culture war, right? It was, it was, it was sort of an extremely polarized environment, and you know it was very clear, I think, to a lot of people that sort of the tech work movement was sort of on one side of the culture war, but what happened over the over the the course of tech workers engaging in this political activism and protesting and writing open letters and in fact in return facing retaliation from their own bosses, right? Getting getting put on on on PIPs in some cases getting fired. What happened in that process was that a lot of tech workers went from, from, from just political activism to, in fact, gaining class consciousness and and realizing that, you know, it's not just these political issues that are at stake, but rather it's it's you know embedded in that is a is a class problem, and so I think what we saw, especially in these early years of the tech worker movement, was was a transformation of of sort of these culture war issues very quickly into a class war issue.
Clarissa Redwine 36:16
Yeah, this this reminds me of so, at whenever I was at Kickstarter, I you know was a plucky little tech worker, you know believing in meritocracy, thought my bosses were on my side, and when we had this moment that sparked our union drive, so just to go into it just just a bit, there was a moment where Breitbart, a right-wing outlet, wrote an article saying that Kickstarter was inciting violence because there was a project up on the site called "Always Punch Nazis. It was a little comic book, and they didn't like that. And Kickstarter's leadership was like, you know what? We don't need this heat. We are going to cancel that project, and the workers of Kickstarter. This was at a time where everyone was watching how tech was contributing to the rise of the alt right, and Kickstarter workers were up in arms. You know, we we essentially revolted, and it was we won. By the way, like they reversed that decision. Everyone was euphoric until we heard that one of the main organizers in that action had been fired, and you know we we had a retro after that was just for the workers, and several of my coworkers broke down in tears and said that they were facing pretty harsh retaliation. And like JS was saying, that was a moment where that that culture war issue turned into a class war, and you know, for many of us at the time, it was seeing how the boss responded, how they changed the conditions of the workplace to make sure that never happened again, and that was what we're seeing at large in the tech industry as a whole, as these tech oligarchs, what we call it, gain billionaire class consciousness, and you know, there's this quote that's burned into my brain from one of my coworkers, where when management sent around an email calling all the union organizers sexist and racist for talking about issues of systemic sexism and racism, he said, you know, that was the moment when I realized they don't just disagree with us; they are at war. And I think the more we can spark those experiences in the tech industry, the more prepared workers will be to stand up when their boss says we're going to apply AI to this drone strike, you know that that we need to build that kind of muscle, and you know these issues start to blur very quickly when you actually stand up and fight for them.
Nikhil Singh 38:56
Yeah, I think that's really helpful. And one of the little details that struck me was in the Me Too moment at Google, how those demands that came out of that for pay equity, for transparency in sexual harassment processes, for you know for really just kind of basic workplace fairness are not the things that we ever remembered from that, you know. So, like, there was a desire on the part of the company to turn these issues towards, okay, everyone's going to have have to have mandatory training now for this, and not to touch the workplace equity, transparency, like the the real demands that actually came up, which are actually class demands. They're economic demands. They're workplace control demands, and and that is one of the challenges of this kind of issue, right? It's like it's like how the the desire is to always then turn it back. Into a culture war issue that can be divisive, right? So, so now suddenly your your workplace organizing is disadvantaging the H 1b visa holder, or the you know it's the it's the bosses will go straight to sort of the the kinds of divisions that can sort of then they they can reaccentuate in order to make it harder to organize, and I think that's partly what you're pointing to here. Yeah,
Clarissa Redwine 40:24
one thing that I'll I'll add that's sort of related to this line of thought is you know we've sort of mentioned this in various ways, but I want to make it super clear because it's it's so important. So at the beginning of the tech worker movement, tech workers had been part of this culture where our own bosses were saying, you know, you're mini entrepreneurs. You have the agency to build what you want. Just go for it. You know, we believe in you, talented kiddo. That was the vibe. So when we started taking action to defend the mission of the company, there was no question whether or not tech workers had the right to talk about what our technology should be doing in the world. Like, what tech should we build? We be building. How could it be applied in society? There was no hesitation. You know, it was just second nature for tech workers. And once we saw tech workers, you know, like ourselves, shifting to the recognition model where we were focused on getting a recognized union. A lot of that ambition that started the movement that was like unfettered worker power was channeled and pushed down into this very narrow set of precedent that we've seen in union contracts before, and we started to think, "Wow, why has this kind of thing not been more normalized across the entire labor movement? And that that led us to this idea that you know, labor law in itself is conflict avoidant. It's meant to keep labor peace, and I think the tech worker movement is a very good little example or illustration of how this system has shaped all labor struggle, all workers' struggle.
Nikhil Singh 42:15
Should we maybe now open it up to see if there are questions and comments? Yeah, you guys can field your questions. Maybe just please introduce yourself when you're asking your question.
J.S. Tan 42:26
Yeah. Is is there another mic, by the way, that we can? I can
Nikhil Singh 42:29
talk about. Or you can pass through. We can
J.S. Tan 42:31
share. Oh yeah, we can share.
Nikhil Singh 42:32
Oh,
J.S. Tan 42:33
maybe there's another mic.
Speaker 1 42:33
Thanks, Denise. Thanks, Denise. Sorry, y'all. It's those fabulous nails on home. Aleni Mannis, hi. I I'm the research director at the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project. So we push government agencies to do better with respect to mass surveillance, to stop mass surveillance, and I have a question for you about how you organize these tech workers. So organized labor, as I understand it, typically has been built on workers' grievances about what they're being paid, about the conditions of their work, and I don't think tech workers have that right. Y'all are really well paid, and many people that I know in tech have self-selected into the field because it is well paid. So my question is, and this may speak more to the tech world now than the startup idealistic tech world, but today, how do you get someone who took the job in part for the compensation to be angry enough about values like like surveillance to to put their neck on the line and say no to what the company is building on on as a matter of principle, not because they're not making enough. Yeah, thanks.
Clarissa Redwine 44:06
Yeah, funny enough, you know these highly paid workers. I was chatting with JS about this the other day. When workers have all their needs met, you know they're being paid more than almost anyone else in their families. You know, there's this interesting thing that happens where they are free to imagine more and to fight for more. So a lot of early tech worker organizing was motivated by values, by this feeling that we should not be contributing to anything that is harmful to our communities. And I think one of the actually big mistakes of the tech worker movement was when we turned toward more traditional organizing that was based on bread and butter issues like pay. Suddenly, a lot it was hard to motivate tech workers around getting a pay bump because they were like, "I'm fine actually, but you know, I really hate that. My team's understaffed, and I have to overwork, or I really hate that we're building something for the military. Like it was kind of a, yeah, kind of a mistake. But that being said, I do think in the era that we are, with mass layoffs, with degradation of working conditions, and with this loss of, there's almost a loss of like cachet with these jobs. You know, if you work in tech, it's somewhat shameful. Not like it was 10 years ago. All all of that helps build this agitation in workers, where they are more willing to speak up. Yeah.
J.S. Tan 45:41
Yeah. Maybe just to add one little bit, I think maybe this ties back to that earlier question we had about about class consciousness and political consciousness. You know, I think our perspective is is that when we're organizing, we are actually agnostic on the the kind of issue that a tech worker is interested in fighting for, right? So in some cases it might be, you know, on call hours are really tough, and we need more staffing. And in other cases it might be, you know, we we wanted to make sure that the algorithm is not, you know, punishing folks from the LGBTQ community, or you know. So regardless of the type of issue, I think our strategy is actually to move towards winning whatever that is, right? Not to say, oh, you're interested in that military contract. Well, you know that's not gonna that's not really gonna fly with most of the work with most of the the unit. Rather, it is to sort of embrace that, and likewise with bread and butter issues, because I think that process of fighting, of you know, speaking to your coworkers about it, of you know, challenging your boss on those issues, is this kind of process in which a lot of these issues start to get bundled, and and people start to see the relationship between, you know, building surveillance technology that will surveil broadly the working class in the country and their own working conditions and those of their coworkers.
Speaker 1 47:12
So, if I understand you correctly, people aren't risk averse just because they're earning a bundle.
Clarissa Redwine 47:18
That's right. I would say sometimes they're even more willing. They're like, you know what? I'm pretty positive I can get a comparable job elsewhere. I'm gonna stand up. The the only thing that we see is the most friction comes in with people not seeing a path to victory. They're like, you know, I don't want to sign that open letter because I don't see any strategy behind it that will actually pressure our bosses. So why take the risk? And that is precisely how we end the book. Is like we must find where our leverage is if we want to invite more people into this fight. Because at the beginning of the movement, signing an open letter, going to the press, that was effective. It's no longer effective.
Speaker 1 47:58
Thanks.
Speaker 2 48:03
Evan Corth. I'm a director of a master's degree at Corant in the computer science department. Master's in computer and entrepreneurship and innovation. I've been involved in the startup community in New York since the '90s. Watch the dot-com bubble pop. The whole, the whole journey, and from that perspective, I see, you know, whereas my modal student was this an idealistic person that wanted to change the world for the better, I don't think that's the next generation coming up now. I think the the zeitgeist of the tech industry being as it is right now is attracting a different kind of person. In my program, it's a small elite program. I've been running it for about 10 years. I talk to the students when they come in, and 12 students last year, when I was gaging what their interests are, two of them said specifically said they want to be entrepreneurs in military tech.
Clarissa Redwine 49:08
And you failed them. No, that's
Speaker 2 49:10
that's 18 percent of this elite program. So you know, I'd love to share your optimism, and I came at this industry as a complete idealist, but I'm completely crestfallen about what's coming and what you know where we are and what I what I see coming. Let
Clarissa Redwine 49:29
me I'll just I'll just add something real quick because I know JS has yeah has spoken to many folks coming up as well. But I my take is as a tech worker myself who was very grind mindset. You know what I mean. Like I, I have a feeling that once these students make it into the workforce, they will see that you know grinding, meritocracy, things like that, are not actually where they're going. Define security and you know build toward the things that they want to see in the world. So like I think it's a matter of time before that there are holes poked in that mindset. But yeah, maybe I'm too much of an optimist. I don't know.
J.S. Tan 50:16
Yeah, I mean I. So now I guess as a as a PhD student at MIT, I get the the privilege of teaching undergrads sometimes, and and I've had a couple of CS undergrads at MIT take a course that I've I've taught. I got to speak to them about the tech sector a little bit, and I think they plan to go into the tech sector, but have no, but we're not kind of rosy-eyed like like we were when we were entering tech sector, in the sense that they they knew that this was very much like, you know, we're here to get the money to work for this horrible industry. You know, maybe maybe what it was like when, you know, the kind of image that the the the you know that Wall Street had when we were graduating a couple years after the financial crisis, but I guess that's just to say that I think that there is quite a variety of people entering the tech sector now, and and you know maybe in like the early 2010 s, the vast majority of people were sort of these, you know, believed in technology, maybe a little bit on the nerdier side. Whereas now they're kind of just elite performers, and they kind of want to get the bag and you know go go go. But but I I think like Clarissa said, I'm I'm expecting that as they enter the workforce, they'll start to sort of they'll start to sort of see all kinds of issues that they that they that they may disagree with, and I think part of the work of organizing is sort of looking for those opportunities to sort of you know agitate and and sort of prod people in the direction of of thinking about what it what it means to to sort of build collective power and and part of that means having these long negotiations on what it what technology should we be building should we be you know racing towards an AGI superlord and and and plastering the country with data centers, or or are there other types of technologies that we should be building? I think that is part of part of the work of organizing in many ways.
Speaker 3 52:36
Hi, my name is Jean. I'm an LLM student here at NYU, and my question is relating to what you said about labor laws themselves being conflict avoidant. I'm obviously thinking about this from the legal sort of how lawyers or people in the legal industry can help, but specifically, my question is: in your observation, I'm assuming there were whistleblower protection laws at all stages of this struggle. Were they helpful, or were they sort of like just sitting pretty and not really helping with any issues? And then related to that, how do you think about equity in tech? So there are tech workers, but there is definitely a diversity issue even there. So when we answer the question, what kind of tech should we be building? How do we ensure that, even in organizing, we're sort of considering outside of what the industry has self-selected for? So yeah, what do you think about these two questions? Yeah,
Clarissa Redwine 53:45
that that's a great question. Following our last one, speaking of self-selection, because the yeah the the trend that you're seeing in your students was absolutely cultivated by the tech bosses, but when it comes to you know whistleblowing, I think we've seen over the years that whistleblowing can be a contribution to putting pressure on a company for sure, especially galvanizing the workers who are still there, who are like you know, enough is enough. And yes, there are protections. Like we, we several several people in our circles have blown the whistle and actually have won cases against these companies. But that being said, it's an extremely long process, and usually the crisis doesn't have time to wait. So I think it's it has to be paired if someone wants to whistle blow, and in in our circles, a lot of people choose to stay because they want to keep their leverage on the shop floor and be able to speak to their coworkers. Yeah, yeah. Do you want to?
J.S. Tan 54:56
Yeah, I mean, I I think the the other part. To your question on on sort of why labor law is sort of promotes labor peace, I think maybe just to give a another example is, and I hope this is not too unrelated, but you know one of the campaigns that we that we followed pretty closely in our book is the campaign that tech workers at Mapbox, which is a a sort of Google Maps competitor startup, the campaign the campaign to unionize that they had, and you know at this point in the tech worker movement when they started their campaign, they were very much focused on organizing a union, a legally recognized union, and so they wanted to win union recognition and be recognized by the NLRB. And so, you know, they they organized very much in that direction, and and part of that meant that they couldn't organize with their international coworkers in Europe, and so as a result, their strategy focused, you know, pretty much on, you know, we're going to talk to every single one of our coworkers in the U.S. And what that what that led to was an an opportunity for their bosses to to put a wedge between them and their international coworkers, and it got, and that was so effective. It got to the point of their international coworkers, who were in fact being paid less than them, calling for you know calling calling for the union to be disbanded, right? And so I think that is part of, you know, that's just one example of where we see that being a problem.
Clarissa Redwine 56:47
What one other example that might be helpful, and so early in the tech worker movement, when there were no constraints, like tech workers had no concept of labor law, it was of course a given that they would reach out to their international counterparts and include them in any collective actions, but at Kickstarter, there's another example of labor law shaping the union drive and specifically constraining collective worker power. So the workers at Kickstarter originally wanted to include our lower-level managers in our bargaining unit, which is what JS was talking about, and because they didn't have any real power as managers, if they wanted to hire and fire, they had to ask the people above them, and you know we we we had a community of interest is what it's usually called, and management weaponized labor law to say, you know what, managers are not allowed in the bargaining unit, and if anybody here is a manager involved in the union, you may have legal consequences. You could be fired. They essentially scared people with this idea that we know more about labor law than you do, so let us make the call the shots. And we see that again and again in the tech worker movement, where either labor law is weaponized against workers, or it it constrains the worker power that exists in tech companies that are yeah transnational.
Speaker 4 58:36
Hi, my name is Cade. I'm an MPA student. I worked as a product designer and a product manager for five years at the same tech company. I'm led to believe that that's pretty rare-that most young folks in tech hop around to different companies. And so, one, I want to check that that assumption is correct-that tech that tech workers do indeed stay at companies for shorter durations than workers in more traditional industries, and then if that assumption is true, I wonder what does that mean for developing organizing strategies for tech workers who don't recognize one boss they've seen for decades, but multiple bosses in that place, and then if not, if tech workers indeed are staying at companies. Does that mean that they can adopt traditional protest methods?
Speaker 5 59:30
I should go right now. Okay. I just want to. Okay. I guess yeah. I thought it was interesting the way you were talking about how kind of the nature of tech work is one of like automating profit generation and how that makes it sort of fundamentally incompatible with more conventional organizing tactics like striking and stuff. And I guess I was thinking a little bit about the integration of AI tools in tech work and how that proliferation has like further shifted the dynamic. Bargaining table, either I imagine against, but if there's sort of complicated effects there, I'd be curious to hear you speak on that.
Clarissa Redwine 1:00:09
Yeah, you're you're absolutely right that the tenure of a tech worker is quite short, but beyond that, there are so many reorgs, you know, and so many changes within these companies that the the the solidarity that is built up over years of working you know on the factory floor on the warehouse floor is somewhat lost in the tech workplace, and even beyond that you know people may work with a very small number of people and very few of those people share the same role as you and yeah I think for us, we we think a lot about this situation and how we can give people the experience of collective action as quickly as possible before they are out the door.
J.S. Tan 1:00:54
Yeah, and just a quick thing to that point. So I I think yeah, you know we we did look we did look up numbers. Tenure is quite short in the tech sector. I imagine there's quite a bit of variation. For example, people who are on H 1b are probably tied to their companies for a while, like in fact I was. I do think that the the idea of basically gravitating towards conflict and to to winning where you are, even if you're there for a short time, is is correct because even if you are moving across or you know to a different company, you know what we found over our time organizing the tech sector is that that you know the the sort of network of tech workers is actually quite tight, and you know, once you start organizing, once you start building this network of of other folks who are interested in organizing, oftentimes that sort of opens up opportunities to salt. Salt being sort of going to a company with a specific goal of organizing, and so yeah, that's just to say that there's a strong network and and sort of starting to do it now and starting to win even if you're not going to get to winning recognition you know five years down the road I think is still worthwhile in terms of in terms of AI yeah so that's a really great question because I I think that you know in in some ways, tech workers are are kind of the the guinea pigs, or or at the frontier of sort of the kind of displacement or disruption that AI will have across white collar professional work. You know, if we sort of think of the the work of a software engineer, for instance, to be automating, you know, the profits for their firm with tools like Claude Code or Codex. I could sort of see more and more white collar professionals starting to use these tools to automate aspects of their jobs, so that when they step away from it, they'll sort of run into the same issue that tech workers have been facing for years, and so for organizing, I do think that this this is a a very important sort of moment and and technology that tech workers need to be really reckoning with. You know, as a software engineer, having worked as a software engineer, I I know for a fact that with Cloud Code I can build things you know in a couple hours or over a weekend that would would have taken me months previously, but I think you know I I think what that does is that that will reduce in some ways the kind of leverage that tech workers have. It has this kind of deskilling effect, but I I think also at the same time, the tech industry is still going to continue relying on human work, right? It may be that folks are you know kind of like the progression of going from coding in in C to to sort of object oriented, right? Sort of working at this higher level of abstraction. You know, maybe that is perhaps the right metaphor for now this shift going from sort of you know writing in Java or Python to now this even higher level of abstraction. But I think at the end of the day, there's still going to be human labor involved, and I think I think that is exactly the leverage that we need to sort of be seeking.
Nikhil Singh 1:04:25
Can I just follow up on that? Because I was thinking about this when I was reading the book, and how I was thinking. I guess the question I had was, are there are there are there technical solution or technical responses or responses from within tech work itself to the tools that are being used against tech workers. So I was thinking specifically about the example of the code freeze, which you which you mentioned a couple of times. Like Twitter has a code freeze to basically make it impossible for or make it easier to fire people. Right and hard and and intensive work up until the code freeze, so the code set, and then it's like you're you're you're more disposable, and then the New York Times has a code freeze later in the book, and I was just thinking about are there are there responses from within the the software engineering process since I'm not a tech person, are there are there ways of imagining or counteracting the kind of tools that would be used against you as a tech worker? I mean, this gets back to the my earlier quip about sabotage, but also thinking about how these how the expertise you have as a tech worker can be used to develop new ways of thinking about organizing, but also just power in the workplace. I was thinking about that also the data for power tool that was developed by the New York someone in the New York Times, I believe, more examples like that I think are really, really interesting to me as someone who doesn't know much about this, but that also could be salting other campaigns elsewhere. Since almost all of these industries, not just tech, are going to rely on tech and surveillance tools going forward to discipline workers. I wonder if that's just something you've given thought to.
Clarissa Redwine 1:06:24
Yeah, yeah, you're exactly right. For anyone in this room who does, who didn't pick up on that, the code freeze at Twitter and at the New York Times during the strike was meant to prevent angry workers from sabotaging the code base, but yeah, it had the effect that you're talking about. But one thing that I want to bring up before I hand it over to to JS is, you know, there were moments that undermined the strike, that had nothing to do with with with AI or with the code freeze. At the New York Times, the the management said to workers, "Hey, leading up to the election, we want to gold plate the site. We want to make sure that it's like humming along, so that when we have increased traffic, because people want to see the results, want to track the results, the platform will keep running, right? And workers, because they had never been in this kind of a fight with the boss before, just agreed. They were like, "Okay, we'll work 60-hour weeks leading up to our own strike, and also we'll document everything that we do, so you can hand it over to contractors that are temporarily hired while we're on strike. And like, of course, they didn't really. Some organizers absolutely put two and two together, but the vast majority of workers just thought, you know, management is acting in good faith, and there are moments like this that you can only learn how you're undermining your own strike threat if you actually try it.
J.S. Tan 1:08:02
Yeah, I mean, I I think the the other thing is that I we I think at this point, you know, after writing this book, what we're sort of advocating for is for tech workers to to really think quite deeply and analyze where they are, where their leverage is within, you know, with with where they're sitting, right? And this is gonna this is gonna differ role to role, teams to teams, even even firms to firms, as as different business models vary within within the sector. And and I think part of that work is is not taking for granted the kind of the the kind of strategies that sort of traditional labor methods have advocated for, because that assumes where someone's leverage is, and and so you know, yeah, what we've been really trying to push out with this book is is to say, you know, as a tech worker, you need to sort of understand, like for instance, okay, is my company, you know, with with the bosses pushing, you know, pushing tools like Cloud Code onto us, how much, you know, how much of this slop code is is going to build up in in in technical debt, and and at what point, right, you know, having sort of this kind of analysis on on where on where someone's leverage is is is really key, and you know we we point to actually the the the organizing that happens in universities and specifically in among grad workers as as a productive case study in our book, and that's because you know like tech workers, grad workers are also, you know, they they do different kinds of work. They are, they are, they have different roles. I mean, and and and and to to to strike as a grad worker, you know, the efficacy of that is really going to depend on a bunch of things, right? You can't just go on strike for. For three days at some random point in the semester, and hope that you know the university board comes and comes to the table and and cedes to your demands, right? If you're if you are a if you are a grad worker who is who has a teaching assistant position at the at you know at the university, well, probably it matters when you strike, when grades are due, right? As opposed to, you know, let's say I go on strike Thursday, Friday, but I'm only teaching on Mondays, right? Well, so I think that that's the kind of analysis that we're trying to encourage more and more tech workers to take on and to recognize that their leverage is actually going to vary across the across the workforce. Yeah,
Clarissa Redwine 1:10:43
I I can give a specific example just to just to add on just real quick. So at Kickstarter, as we were handing in the manuscript, so it's not in the book, but there was a 42 day strike at Kickstarter for their second contract, and the workers of Kickstarter were thinking critically about how they would maximize their pressure on the picket line, and they went to their international OPEIU and said, "You know what? We're thinking all the software engineers will leave first, and then everyone who's a non-technical worker will come on the picket line a few weeks later. That was a very smart, insightful idea from these workers, you know, it would take longer for the code to break for software engineers, and they're also the higher-paid workers. They can go without pay for longer, but the national said that's not how this is done. We're not going to approve your strike if you don't go all out together, and these are the kinds of things that you know the next time they strike, these workers are going to insist that they follow this other strategy, and you know we we need to see more of that. The
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