Collective action isn’t just for the downtrodden. The New York Times recently wrote about how concerns over their companies potentially fueling and facilitating political violence had led workers in Silicon Valley to band together. Last summer, Facebook employees organized a virtual walkout after executives chose not to take action in relation to posts from Donald Trump containing what they described as “hateful rhetoric advocating violence against black demonstrators.” The Washington Post cited an internal letter delivered to Twitter leadership this January in which “roughly 350 Twitter employees requested an investigation into the past several years of corporate actions that led to Twitter’s role in the [Capitol] riot.”
Employees of the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter voted to unionize last year, but unionization among tech workers and other white-collar professionals has so far been rare. Collective action for these kinds of workers has more often taken a different form. In the case of Silicon Valley, employees have largely used organizing as a way to advocate toward particular actions they believe the company should take rather than bargaining for wage and benefits increases. Their efforts have generally centered around issues like the potential dangers of AI and the collection of certain demographic data. But workers in private companies have few free speech rights, so it is possible that more of them will begin to seek the robust legal protections afforded unionized workers.
Comments are closed.