I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me at NEW ZEALAND'S UNITY BOOKS in AUCKLAND on May 2, and in WELLINGTON on May 3. More tour dates (Pittsburgh, PDX, London, Manchester) here.
Tech workers are a weird choice for "princes of labor," but for decades they've enjoyed unparalleled labor power, expressed in high wages, lavish stock grants, and whimsical campuses with free laundry and dry-cleaning, gourmet cafeterias, and kombucha on tap:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhUtdgVZ7MY
All of this, despite the fact that tech union density is so low it can barely be charted. Tech workers' power didn't come from solidarity, it came from scarcity. When you're getting five new recruiter emails every day, you don't need a shop steward to tell your boss to go fuck themselves at the morning scrum. You can do it yourself, secure in the knowledge that there's a company across the road who'll give you a better job by lunchtime.
Tech bosses sucked up to their workers because tech workers are insanely productive. Even with sky-high salaries, every hour a tech worker puts in on the job translates into massive profits. Which created a conundrum for tech bosses: if tech workers produce incalculable value for the company every time they touch their keyboards, and if there aren't enough tech workers to go around, how do you get whichever tech workers you can hire to put in as many hours as possible?
The answer is a tactic that Fobazi Ettarh called "vocational awe":
"Vocational awe" describes the feeling that your work matters so much that you should accept all manner of tradeoffs and calamities to get the job done. Ettarh uses the term to describe the pathology of librarians, teachers, nurses and other underpaid, easily exploited workers in "caring professions." Tech workers are weird candidates for vocational awe, given how well-paid they are, but never let it be said that tech bosses don't know how to innovate – they successfully transposed an exploitation tactic from the most precarious professionals to the least precarious.
As farcical as all the engineer-pampering tech bosses got up to for the first couple decades of this century was, it certainly paid off. Tech workers stayed at the office for every hour that god sent, skipping their parents' funerals and their kids' graduations to ship on time. Snark all you like about empty platitudes like "organize the world's information and make it useful" or "bring the world closer together," but you can't argue with results: workers who could – and did – bargain for anything from their bosses…except a 40-hour work-week.
But for tech bosses, this vocational awe wheeze had a fatal flaw: if you convince your workforce that they are monk-warriors engaged in the holy labor of bringing forth a new, better technological age, they aren't going to be very happy when you order them to enshittify the products they ruined their lives to ship. "I fight for the user" has been lurking in the hindbrains of so many tech workers since the Tron years, somehow nestling comfortably alongside of the idea that "I don't need a union, I'm a temporarily embarrassed founder."
Tech bosses don't actually like workers. You can tell by the way they treat the workers they don't fear. Sure, Tim Cook's engineers get beer-fattened, chestnut finished and massaged like Kobe cows, but Cook's factory workers in China are so maltreated that Foxconn (the cutout Apple uses to run "iPhone City" where Apple's products are made) had to install suicide nets to reduce the amount of spatter from workers who would rather die than put in another hour at Tim Apple's funtime distraction rectangle factory:
Jeff Bezos's engineers get soft-play areas, one imported Australian barista for each mini-kitchen, and the kind of Japanese toilet that doesn't just wash you after but also offers you a trim and dye-job, but Amazon delivery drivers are monitored by AIs that narc them out for driving with their mouths open (singing is prohibited in Uncle Jeff's delivery pods!) and have to piss in bottles; meanwhile, Amazon warehouse workers are injured at three times the rate of other warehouse workers.
This is how tech bosses would treat tech workers…if they could.
And now? They can.
Writing for the Wall Street Journal, Katherine Bindley describes the new labor dynamics at Big Tech:
It starts with Meta, who just announced a 5% across-the-board layoff – on the same day that it doubled executive bonuses. But it's not just the workers who get shown the door who suffer in this new tech reality – the workers on the job are having to do two or three jobs, for worse pay, and without all those lovely perks.
Take Google, where founder Sergey Brin just told his workers that they should be aiming for a "sweet spot" of 60 hours/week. Brin returned to Google to oversee its sweaty and desperate "pivot to AI," and like so many tech execs, he's been trumpeting the increased productivity that chatbots will deliver for coders. But a coder who picks up their fired colleagues' work load by pulling 60-hour work-weeks isn't "more productive," they're more exploited.
Amazon is another firm whose top exec, Andy Jassy, has boasted about the productivity gains of AI, but an Amazon Web Services manager who spoke to Bindley says that he's lost so many coders that he's now writing code for the first time in a decade.
Then there's a Meta recruiter who got fired and then immediately re-hired, but as a "short term employee" with no merit pay, stock grants, or promotions. She has to continuously reapply for her job, and has picked up the workload of several fired colleagues who weren't re-hired. Meta managers (the ones whose bonuses were just doubled) call this initiative "agility." Amazon is famous for spying on its warehouse workers and drivers – and now its tech staff report getting popups warning them that their keystrokes are being monitored and analyzed, and their screens are being recorded.
Bindley spoke to David Markley, an Amazon veteran turned executive coach, who attributed the worsening conditions (for example, managers being given 30 direct reports) to the "narrative" of AI. Not, you'll note, the actual reality of AI, but rather, the story that AI lets you "collapse the organization," slash headcount and salaries, and pauperize the (former) princes of labor.
The point of AI isn't to make workers more productive, it's to make them weaker when they bargain with their bosses. Another of Bindley's sources went through eight rounds of interviews with a company, received an offer, countered with a request for 12% more than the offer, and had the job withdrawn, because "the company didn’t want to move ahead anymore based on the way the compensation conversation had gone."
For decades, tech workers were able to flatter themselves that they were peers with their bosses – that "temporarily embarrassed founder" syndrome again. The Google founders and Zuck held regular "town hall" meetings where the rank-and-file engineers could ask impertinent questions. At Google, these have been replaced with "tightly scripted events." Zuckerberg has discontinued his participation in company-wide Q&As, because they are "no longer a good use of his time."
Companies are scaling back perks in both meaningful ways (Netflix hacking away at parental leave), and petty ones (Netflix and Google cutting back on free branded swag for workers). Google's hacked back its "fun budget" for offsite team-building activities and replacement laptops for workers needing faster machines (so much for prioritizing "increasing worker productivity").
Trump's new gangster capitalism pits immiserated blue collar workers against the "professional and managerial class," attacking universities and other institutions that promised social mobility to the children of working families. Trump had a point when he lionized factory work as a source of excellent wages and benefits for working people without degrees, but he conspicuously fails to mention that factory work was deadly, low-waged and miserable – until factory workers formed unions:
Re-shoring industrial jobs to the USA is a perfectly reasonable goal. Between uncertain geopolitics, climate chaos, monopolization and the lurking spectre of the next pandemic, we should assume that supply-chains will be repeatedly and cataclysmicly shocked over the next century or more. And yes, re-shoring product could provide good jobs to working people – but only if they're unionized.
But Trump has gutted the National Labor Relations Board and stacked his administration with bloodsucking scabs like Elon Musk. Trump doesn't want to bring good jobs back to America – he wants to bring bad jobs back to America. He wants to reshore manufacturing jobs from territories with terrible wages, deadly labor conditions, and no environment controls by taking away Americans' wages, labor rights and environmental protections. He doesn't just want to bring home iPhone production, he wants to import the suicide nets of iPhone City, too.
Tech workers are workers, and they once held the line against enshittification, refusing to break the things they'd built for their bosses in meaningless all-nighters motivated by vocational awe. Long after tech bosses were able to buy all their competitors, capture their regulators, and expand IP law to neutralize the threat of innovative, interoperable products like alternative app stores, ad-blockers and jailbreaking kits, tech workers held the line.
There've been half a million US tech layoff since 2023. Tech workers' scarcity-derived power has been vaporized. Tech workers can avoid the fate of the factory, warehouse and delivery workers their bosses literally work to death – but only by unionizing.
In other words, the workers in re-shored factories and tech workers need the same thing. They are class allies – and tech bosses are their class enemies. This is class war.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Yes, I know, doctors are late to the game, only now experiencing what many job classes went through 30-50 years ago. Yes, yes, we're a privileged class.
What my point is, is that we are all, all of us, being proletarianized. Even those of us who were over thought of as classically wealthy are now pawns to the owner class
L. F. is currently checking the status
of flights departing. From now on the sky
is dark, gritty, incredibly violent &
valent. People get listed in full details
but it is hard to believe. Anyway the conference
is his last adventure as he thinks, and he thinks
windows are the standalones' best friends
into the real world during the fifth season
proverbial.
Tech workers spent a whole generation conceiving of themselves as entrepreneurs who bargained, nerd-to-nerd, with other entrepreneurs who needed workers as much as workers needed paychecks.
These workers allowed themselves to be convinced that being “extremely hardcore” — that is, working body- and mind-ruining hours (without overtime pay) was a badge of honor.
They let themselves believe that their bosses gave them gourmet cafeteria food, “on-campus” fitness centers and daycare because they were valued workers — and not because this created the conditions where workers could be induced to put in longer hours without additional pay.
They conceived of themselves as ascetic monks, a priesthood that labored every hour God sent to bring digitization to the world. Meanwhile, their bosses’ wealth soared, even as their own working conditions deteriorated.
Tech workers may be prone to the same rationalization and self-deception as the rest of us, but (like the rest of us), they aren’t fools. Anything that can’t go on forever will eventually stop.
As conditions and prospects worsened, tech workers’ identities as workers emerged from a generation-long coma. They penned manifestos, walked off the job, and formed unions.
-The proletarianization of tech workers: If there is hope, it is in the proles
Remember when tech workers dreamed of working for a big company for a few years, before striking out on their own to start their own company that would knock that tech giant over?
Then that dream shrank to: work for a giant for a few years, quit, do a fake startup, get acqui-hired by your old employer, as a complicated way of getting a bonus and a promotion.
Then the dream shrank further: work for a tech giant for your whole life, get free kombucha and massages on Wednesdays.
And now, the dream is over. All that’s left is: work for a tech giant until they fire your ass, like those 12,000 Googlers who got fired six months after a stock buyback that would have paid their salaries for the next 27 years.
We deserve better than this. We can get it.
-The proletarianization of tech workers: If there is hope, it is in the proles
Today, tech workplaces are white-hot centers of labor organizing. Tech workers are reconceiving of themselves as workers first, techies second — and that’s leading them to connect their struggles to the “blue collar” workers who drive rideshares, pack boxes, label AI data and handle irate customers.
The shrinking dream of the tech worker — from “maker of a dent in the universe” to “disposable source of free cash-flow for a stock-buyback” —has goosed the already-surging rise of labor agitation in tech workplaces, turning a surge into a flood.
-The proletarianization of tech workers: If there is hope, it is in the proles
As is customary for Worldcon panels, the discussion ranged far and wide, and Eric got in a lot of good licks. One thing he said that has stayed with me for the past half-decade; I don’t suppose I remember it word for word, but here’s a paraphrase:
I think that sf ignored trade unions because it was written by and for engineers at a time when their skills were in high demand. Those kinds of workers can get a good deal without unions — for a while.
-The proletarianization of tech workers: If there is hope, it is in the proles
Praying shelters of communities for one umbrella
B. B. is the latest guy you meet somewhere.
You're now following him, which means you'll
see a lukewarm story scleradescent: he collects
insomniac tracks, non collaborative through form.
Though you couldn't see through dense hopes, starts
talking.
These may be the dumbest people in existence,
a large portion of courage: I'll have my reply
the way it should be, the others are not ready
citizens. Angst has announced an interreligious dialogue
with the general archives to protect the physical
integrity of the spokesman, no longer possible.
Suffocated, let him get lost. So what?
