Hi! Thank you so much for being so helpful and informative about unions!! 😍 I’ve read about them in the past put couldn’t really make sense of how they work/their role for individual & group benefit before I read your posts. I still have one question though— I haven’t been able to find an IWW-type of organization that would cover tech workers (developers, designers, engineers; specifically for the web). Do you know of any that I could look in to? I would truly appreciate the help! 💛✨
Hi there! So I’m going to address two things here. First, the nature of IWW vs other unions, and second unions and tech. (Which means this is a long one, but oh well).
First: There are two basic models for how to structure a union (at least in the U.S. -- there might be other systems in other places). The IWW (or International Workers of the World or “Wobblies”) are one massive union that will represent anyone, regardless of their job or industry and regardless of whether the person is in a unionized workplace. The goal of IWW is to unite all workers, across industries and borders. I am less familiar with IWW since I‘m not a member, and so I can’t really speak to how it all works in practice.
The other model, which is the one you find more often in the U.S. is to have unions that represent people within a particular industry, and only if they belong to a workplace that has been unionized under the rules laid out in the National Labor Relations Act. Most of these unions in the U.S. are member unions of the AFL-CIO, which is a federation of unions. In practice, this means that once your workplace votes to unionize, you become a unit or shop within an industry-specific union and your company is required by law to bargain with your unit. You also have the legal right to strike, provided that your strike meets the criteria laid out in the NLRA.
That said, it’s my understanding that when you unionize your workplace, you can vote to unionize as part of the IWW instead of an industry-specific union, though I understand that’s less common and I don’t know enough about it to say what the advantages and disadvantages are. However, if you just join IWW as an individual, without unionizing your workplace under the NLRA, your employer will not be legally required to bargain with you, nor do you have much leverage
But second: to speak to your point about finding people to represent you within the tech industry...
You have a couple options here. You could 1) try to unionize your workplace under the Wobblies, or 2) you could try to find an industry specific union that fits your specific job -- or 3) you could potentially form a new industry-specific union. See, the issue right now is that, because unions have been weakened so much over the past forty years or so, they haven’t necessarily evolved with the economy as much as you would hope. Tech employees can unionize under existing unions -- for example, mobile phone technicians have unionized under the Communications Workers of America, and the Teamsters is trying to organize Amazon drivers. But there isn’t something you’d describe as a “Tech Workers Union.”
You can find more info on that in a really excellent piece here.
So how to fix that? Well, you could potentially form a new industry union. Every industry union in existence today started because a group of employees decided that their industry needed a union. For instance, there’s already a video game workers union -- they don’t have any member units yet, but hopefully they will soon.
This route is a lot more work than unionizing within a more established union -- something that is already a lot of work. So I don’t blame people for (so far) not going this route. Established unions have more resources -- for one thing they already have the cash on hard that comes from having dues-paying members -- and they have expertise to share with you. But it is something you can consider.
Anyway, I hope this was helpful, and that it answered your questions. If there’s stuff you want to hear more about, please let me know!
Solidarity.
