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This has nothing to do with personal consumption. Consumer politics are not going to do anything about AI

join tech workers coalition or no tech for apartheid. There’s a lot of behind the scene work they do at a global level that doesn’t require any exposure

well, from where else should come the power to interject with the company’s plans if not from forming unions? Like what does it mean to hold a company accountable if you have no leverage? Quitting and making a post on social media about it?

Good, even though the union strategy of getting a slice of the cake while enabling processes that will screw over workers everywhere else can be debated.

The author is Italian teaching in Canada. While it’s true that in the USA democratic structures in the workplace are less common than elsewhere, I think the author is presenting the phenomenon in a rethorical fashion to motivate workers to fight the new forms of Authorian control in the workplace.

are you behind a VPN? Because disconnecting from my VPN it started working again.

as if leftists behaved any better

offer people what AI cannot offer: relationships, fun, belonging, relief. If your political organizing is less enjoyable than talking to a chatbot, people will stick to the chatbot.

did you ever organize a strike in a big company?

quitting doesn’t halt the baby-grinding machine. Big tech can only be stopped from the inside. I even know some people getting hired there exclusively to cause trouble. You should respect their commitment rather than anything else.

since botting is so easy, probably they used a lot of accounts to access data that, in theory, is somewhat public. I mean, in an ideal world in which engineers have infinite time sure, they would have noticed, but I do investigations on platform apps for work and trust me, they miss a lot of more fundamental stuff.

spotify has a whole economy of bots signing up, uploading fake songs listened by other bots and earning lot of money in the process. I know several people living out of this. A little army of scraper bots is definitely not what they should be the most concerned about.

People don’t use forums anymore. Union organizing requires big numbers and being comfortable with being visible.

The URL shortener for sure could be addressed and I invite you to join and contribute to improve that part of the stack. Nonetheless, TWC is not a hacker space or a space for tech experts. You need to use the tools people already use and meet them where they are at. Using niche tools people are not familiar with introduces friction and barriers, that filter out people without tech skills, or without the attention and time to learn a new tool and incorporate it in their routines. Most tech workers are not programmers, remember that. Also people who are too privacy-focused and tech-focused tend to be bad organizers: union organizing implies risks and exposure, and you have to be comfortable with that, while privacy-focused people want to minimize individual risk by staying hidden. For sure privacy of your communication from the employer or the government plays an important role, because it might give sensitive information to your enemy, but if retaining privacy prevents you from having impact, it’s pointless to even start.

I’m part of TWC and the organization of this call and I’m Italian. There are different timezones but it’s obviously hard to include all of them. Including UTC wouldn’t help most people.

The very fact that there are two events for two distinct timezones doesn’t suggest there’s an attempt to reach out to a bigger crowd?

Because self-hosting adds complexity and friction, something that impact-oriented organizations might not be able to afford. TWC uses self hosting on more sensitive data anyway, just not on these tools.

The Global chapter of Tech Workers Coalition

The Session A time zone is good for Europeans too. Session B I guess could work for East Asia.

Why do you see this as USA-only?

No union in the world asks rates that high. You’ve been probably have been served some kind of management union busting material if you have ever seen a number that high. 3% is considered very high already.

Anyway AWU is not necessarily trying to bargain for higher wages, but they do work on better job security, better working environments, fairness against abuses, sexual harassment and similar stuff, and obviously they support the political work of anti-genocide groups within Google.

There’s always a reason to join a union if you’re a worker.

I would add exploitation of precarious workers both in the USA, Europe and third-world countries. That said, were you involved in Alphabet Workers Union? If not, why?