No, Tech and Game Workers Are Not “Too Privileged To Organize”
On January 3rd 2021 the Alphabet Workers Union (AWU) went public, the culmination of a year of underground organizing by workers at Google and other Alphabet subsidiaries. This has huge implications: for half a century organized labor has had virtually no presence in the tech industry, one of the largest sectors of the world economy. Now a union is being formed at Google, a giant corporation that employs 200,000 workers and the name people think of when they think “tech.”
For some this seems counter-intuitive. Why would the pampered, six-figure salary, ping pong playing coders we see on TV need a union? Some have even gone as far as to accuse these workers of “appropriating” unionism from the blue-collar teamsters and coal miners of the world.
Often these arguments are levied dishonestly, disingenuous “concern for the labor movement” coming from the defenders of the status quo. But I also don’t blame the average person for not fully understanding why unionization is so important in tech and games. Our industries have accumulated such a mythology, bolstered by TV shows like Silicon Valley and gratuitous interviews with “visionary” CEOs. In this article I’ll do my best to break down the myths, and explain why unionizing tech isn’t just important — it’s a necessary step if we are to preserve a future for working people in the US and beyond.
There’s a lot to say on this topic, but I’ll focus on three principles by which tech and game workers are not “too privileged to organize”:
- Tech workers are a heterogeneous group that spans many levels of privilege
- Tech workers are organizing around the social impact of their products, not just personal benefit
- Unionizing tech and games strengthens the global labor movement, and all workers with it!
Curious? Then read on!
Point 1: Tech and Game Workers Span Many Levels of Privilege
While the games and tech sectors contain a number of well-paid employees, there’s a huge spectrum of compensation across workers in our industries. In video games we have engineers making six-figure salaries, quality assurance testers making minimum wage, and everything in between. Tech has a similar dynamic; there may be a number of handsomely compensated full-time coders, but Giants like Google employ thousands of workers in other trades and at different levels of compensation.
An acronym you’ve probably seen in the Alphabet headlines is “TVC,” which stands for temps, vendors, and contractors. These are workers who build Google products, support Google services, manage internal Google operations, and often sit next to Google employees, but technically work for third-party companies that Google contracts. TVCs tend to be paid less than Google employees with the same job titles and skill-sets, receive fewer benefits, and face great job insecurity as contracts come and go. TVCs make up a large portion of the workforce across all tech companies — many get strung along for years with the promise of full-time employment, but all too often this is never fulfilled.
It must also be emphasized that “tech worker” doesn’t just mean “programmer.” Building and supporting tech products requires assembly-line workers building devices, content moderators who spend their days trawling through traumatizing user content (cw: graphic link), cooks and baristas to feed the workforce, warehouse workers to ensure packages reach their destinations, and a host of other professions through all walks of life. Not all of these workers make six figure salaries — many barely scratch out a living wage while residing in some of the world’s most expensive cities.
Finally, let’s remember that compensation isn’t the only factor that contributes to an employee’s quality of life. In the games industry there are plenty of employees who make well over a living wage, but also have to endure “crunch” — months without weekends, years of 60 hour weeks, and irrevocable damage to their relationships with their loved ones. In 2018 twenty thousand Google employees walked out to protest a culture of harassment and discrimination towards racial and gender minorities, and in 2019 Riot Games workers organized a similar walkout. While some of these workers may be paid well, they certainly exist under conditions that could stand to be improved.
Are all of these workers “too privileged” to benefit from a union? Probably not. And the most vulnerable among them can’t win this fight without the solidarity and support of their less precarious coworkers. A better future is possible, but it takes all of us together to make it happen.
Point 2: Tech Workers are Organizing Around the Social Impact of Their Products
Let’s imagine that you work at a giant tech company, developing data processing technology for a six-figure salary. You feel proud knowing that your product helps the world operate more efficiently — until one day you learn your employer’s clients are using it to identify protesters, fuel political misinformation, imprison children, plan drone strikes. Our allies at CODE-CWA like to say that “values are working conditions,” and indeed this is a working condition in the truest sense; no amount of money is worth going to sleep knowing that on any given day you may have helped someone blow up a hospital.
You have a few options from this position, most of them bad. You could bite your tongue and stay put, knowing that your daily work contributes to the taking of human life. You could quit, but of course somebody else will be right there to take your place; this may soothe your conscience, but the work and the harm will continue uninterrupted. The third option — and the one Alphabet workers are choosing — is to stand your ground, band together, and demand a say in how your work is used.
Need some examples? In 2018, Google workers pressured their employer to drop a Pentagon contract. In 2019 workers at Microsoft and Github demanded their employers drop all ICE contracts. Just a few days ago, petitioning from Twitter employees was one of the key factors that resulted in the suspending of Donald Trump’s Twitter account. And AWU has hit the ground running, calling out YouTube’s role in enabling fascism and organizing around tech’s involvement in political misinformation, warfare, climate change, and more.
While the need to organize around social impact is most obvious in tech, it’s not also irrelevant in the games industry. Should we have a say in whether our products are used to provide platforms for military recruitment, hook children on gambling mechanics, and promote fascistic retellings of world history? Of course we should. And games and tech alike, we can’t ignore that our products contribute to climate change and ecological destruction, from the energy usage of server farms to the material extraction required to manufacture devices.
So many of us join these industries because we want to be of use, to create experiences that bring joy, to make tools that improve people’s lives. It takes the collective effort of thousands of workers to construct these products, but bizarrely, the decisions on how they’re made and used are left up to a few dozen executives. These profit-hungry suits aren’t going to use our work responsibly — the state of our world today is irrefutable proof of that. It’s up to us, the workers, to claim a say in how our technology is made and used, and we can’t do that as individuals. We need to get organized!
Point 3: Organizing Tech and Games Builds the Global Labor Movement
Unions are not simply benefits services: they are institutional weapons of worker power. Unions fight legal battles for labor laws and help pro-union political candidates get elected. Rank-and-file members use their union as a social infrastructure to promote progressive community projects. And in the early 20th century we saw unions working together in even bigger ways — when one union went on strike, others in unrelated industries would often join them in “solidarity strikes” to force the capitalists’ hands. In 1919, unionists coordinated a general strike in protest of stagnant wages and wartime oppression which literally took over the city of Seattle for five days.
In 2019 just 10.3% of US wage and salary workers were union members, down from 20.1% in 1983. As organized labor’s presence in the workforce has dwindled, so has its power. Just a few months ago we Californians suffered a devastating defeat in the passage of proposition 22 — rideshare companies got to mint a custom-built law that denies their drivers even the simplest of protections like minimum wage. In advertising campaigns and other expenses they outspent the “No” faction — led by groups like Rideshare Drivers United (RDU) and funded by local unions — by 10 to 1, with a total cost of about 200 million dollars.
Let that sink in: Uber and Lyft spent a fifth of a billion dollars to buy themselves a law, with devastating consequences for workers.
Imagine how this situation could have been different if RDU had the support of unionized tech workers at Uber and Lyft, with the power to refuse to implement the incessant in-app “yes on 22” banners. Imagine if the unions contributing to the No campaign had the extra income from tech worker dues to put up a stronger opposition. Even within a single union, a rising tide lifts all boats. AWU’s affiliate union, the CWA, represents flight attendants, telecommunications retail and technical staff, public sector employees, strippers, and many others, all of whom stand to gain from tech workers joining their ranks.
When union penetration increases in any one industry, the power of all labor groups is strengthened. The thing to fear is not white collar tech workers “appropriating” unionism — the nightmare scenario is those workers sitting on the sidelines while their employers wreak havoc upon working people the world over. If one truly cares about the well-being of blue collar workers, then stand with them and fight under the common banner of labor!
Unions: Democracy at Work
My goal as an organizer is not to get union membership back to the 20% of 1983 — the mark is right at 100. Exempting police, every worker in all industries should have a union because having a union simply makes sense. Unions are democratic power structures that exist in our workplaces in opposition to the default power structure, which is a dictatorship. This is the dictatorship of a dozen or so shareholders and executives, who enjoy unchallenged decision-making power on matters that might affect hundreds of thousands of workers. The non-union workplace is as antiquated a concept as the monarchy government; if decisions are to be made that affect thousands of people, shouldn’t they have some amount of say in the matter?
Unions are not social welfare packages to be sparingly doled only to the neediest workers — and those who preach otherwise tend to be those who benefit from a weak, fragmented labor movement. As a rule of thumb, when a powerful person tells you that the “woke” thing to do is sit on the sidelines while multinational corporations ravage the Earth and its working people, you should ask whether they just might have some personal investment in the status quo.
Nothing in this article is to say that we shouldn’t examine and discuss different types of workers through the lens of privilege. Of course a comfortably paid office worker will face fewer challenges than a retail employee surviving on minimum wage. But these differentials of privilege don’t change the fact that democracy is a fundamental human right, and we deserve it in all aspects of our lives — in our communities, in our governments, and in our workplaces.
A better world is possible, but our bosses aren’t going to give it to us out of the goodness of their hearts. Making it real is the task left up to us.
That’s all! I hope you found this information helpful, and I invite you to get in touch if you’d like to learn more about unionizing tech and games. As always I’ll close out with a list of actionables for you, the reader, because building this movement takes all of us — including you.
- Have questions? Email us at gwofsocal@gmail.com or shoot a DM to our Twitter account.
- Are you a worker at an Alphabet Subsidiary? You can learn more about AWU — and sign up to join — using their website. TVCs welcome!
- Ready to organize your workplace? If you’re in North America, we recommend you contact a CODE-CWA organizer through this form — from there you’ll get a prompt response from a CWA organizer who will set up a call to learn about your situation.
- Want to join a community of pro-union workers and volunteers? If you’re a SoCal-based game worker, hit us up at GWSC! Other game workers can see if there’s a Game Workers Unite chapter nearby, and tech workers will find good company in the Tech Workers Coalition.
- Want to learn what it means to unionize? We recommend taking Modules I and II of CODE-CWA’s online organizer trainings. Depending on where you are, you can also contact your local GWU or TWC chapter to learn about local training options in your area.
You might not feel like you have anything to contribute, but we promise you that’s not true. We’re all learning as we go, and our movement needs all the hands it can get!
