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Highlights

• As with the shift to remote work, these layoffs haven’t been distributed evenly - instead, they’re exacerbating existing harms, and visiting those harms on the industry’s most vulnerable workers. (Page 11)
• I realize that for some tech workers, this idea of solidarity can feel like a difficult concept to accept. And I get it, truly. For me, I wonder if some of that difficulty lies in the fact that the idea runs counter to the stories the tech industry tells itself about “meritocracy”: about the brilliant self-starters who struck out alone, and who achieved dizzying successes simply and solely because they were so brilliant and talented and motivated, all without help from anyone else. We’ve bought into this idea of the talented individualist so thoroughly that our stories tend to brush away all the privileges they enjoyed, or the assistance they received: the family that supported them, the wealth they inherited, the educational institutions they had access to. Somehow, our fables focus solely on the child, rather than on the village that raised them. (Page 34)
• In both of these early industrial economies, American mass production relied on an exploited labor force, in which employers' profits came at the expense of their workers. In the North, near the rivers and forests I call home, the expansion of mill towns relied on low-paid workers to labor in the mills: many of the workers were women and children; many of them were immigrants. In the South, the cotton industry relied on the enslavement of Black people, literally selling humans into bondage to toil under dehumanizing, deadly conditions. (Page 51)
• Mutual aid isn’t charity, which involves a one-way distribution of resources from a donor to a recipient, channeled through a charitable organization. Instead, mutual aid is cooperation, informed and led by the community itself. (Page 60)
• I spoke to an organizer who worked at Mapbox during its employees' (sadly failed) campaign to form a union. And they shared something a coworker mentioned in one of their organizing meetings, about why Mapbox’s workers deserved a union: “We recognize the superiority of democracy in every part of life except at work. And it’s interesting how poorly this is appreciated: that organizations make better decisions when more people make decisions, not when fewer people make decisions.” I’ve had this point playing on loop in my head ever since I heard it: organizations make better decisions when more people make decisions. What a wonderful concept. Wouldn’t you like to be involved in making those decisions? Shouldn’t you and your coworkers have a seat at that table? The NLRA provides you with important legal protections, it’s true. But by forming a union, you and your coworkers gain more say over how you work: you can negotiate a collective bargaining agreement to formalize the power you all share and, in doing so, obtain more equal footing with your employer. (Page 64)
• In fact, one quiet thread that ran throughout my interviews was that participating in negotiating sessions was, in its way, a privilege. Bargaining, much like organizing, involves a considerable amount of work, and that often means the process can easily exclude parents, or those who are unable to work long hours, or colleagues who work a second job because their paycheck isn’t enough-in other words, the people who most need to be heard when addressing workplace harms. (Page 108)
• There’s a term for this in economics: deskilling. As a new technology is introduced to an industry, it may be able to complete tasks that had traditionally been performed by human workers. And as the technology matures, it can be overseen by fewer workers, which gradually lowers wages and may eliminate jobs. In other words, the demand for skilled labor is gradually reducedor eliminated altogether. Once the technology reaches a certain critical mass, workers are moved into roles they would traditionally have been seen as overqualified for, while less skilled workers are driven from the market altogether. Every worker is, quite literally, de-skilled by automation. (Page 115)
• But this practice extends far beyond Google. In fact, it’s one that enjoys a long, rich history in our industry. The tech industry’s gains have, time and again, been made precisely because of workers like Google’s Scan Ops contractors: hourly workers performing rote, repetitive tasks, working long hours for little pay. And the reason this strategy has worked is that these workers and their labor have, whenever possible, been hidden from sight. (Page 126)