I had an absolutely wonderful weekend, and — 

Oh yeah, no, sorry: I do realize it’s Thursday. It’s been a week.

Anyway! I had an absolutely wonderful weekend, and I’d like to tell you about it. But first, I need to back up a few weeks, and tell you about a breakfast I had.

I’d gotten up early — like, early — on a Friday to meet a union organizer for breakfast. An old friend of mine had introduced the two of us, and we’d agreed to meet for breakfast at a local diner. The conversation was as good as the food. We talked a bit about the city we both live in, local politics, the weather. It was a fantastic conversation, though I’m afraid I asked them a ton of questions: in my line of work, it’s rare I get to sit down with someone who has decades of experience in their field; rarer still to meet someone who’s been active in organized labor longer than I’ve been alive. I asked them about how they got into the labor movement, the national strikes and campaigns they’d helped plan, and some of the lessons they’d learned over the years.

And then, over hash browns and cooling coffee, they casually mentioned the organizing they’d done in the tech industry in the seventies and eighties — talking to tech workers about the need for widespread, militant unionization, well over forty years ago.

From that point on, I had a lot more questions.

I was thinking about that conversation this past weekend, while I was in New York for the inaugural Tech Organizing Conference, hosted and organized by Labor Notes. It was a day of talks and sessions dedicated to the state of union organizing in tech, led by rank-and-file workers from across the industry’s labor movement. I’m not able to say much about the individual parts of the conference, as attendees were asked to respect each others’ privacy. But I will say this:

I can’t remember the last time I left a conference feeling so energized.

I don’t mean “inspired,” mind you. (Though make no mistake, I certainly was.) Rather, I left a full day of talks, sessions, and hallway conversations feeling fired up. When I got back to my hotel room, my mind felt like it was happily racing: through the highlights of the day, through new ideas I’d been introduced to, over things I’d like to try in my own work. I suppose some of that’s natural, when you spend a day with people who are actively working to make tech work — and the tech industry — better.

But throughout the day, I kept thinking about that breakfast from a few weeks prior. How that organizer casually mentioned they’d been part of a movement to unionize tech decades before 20,000 Google workers staged a global walkout; decades before Glitch gained voluntary recognition; decades before Kickstarter won its first contract; decades before the first-ever bargaining unit at Google went on strike.

There are long, long threads of labor history running throughout the tech industry: stories of workers who’ve fought, organized, and fought some more, all for a better, more equitable vision of what tech work could be. I wrote about this a bit in You Deserve a Tech Union, but I’m constantly awed by these histories, and the people in them.

At the same time, I often get, well, frustrated. It often feels as though these stories — the history of labor in the tech industry — were hidden from me. I mean, why did it take twenty years in this industry before I started learning these histories? Without them, it’s easy to look at the “labor moment” we’re in now, and think it’s somehow different, or aberrant. Something new.

But that’s not the case, of course. As I heard over breakfast, these stories have always been there — tech workers have always been fighting for something better. What’s more, we now have publications like the TWC Newsletter, and organizations like Collective Action in Tech, both of whom have worked to uncover those stories, and make them more broadly accessible.

And as I’ve seen time and again over the last few years — and as I saw again in New York, surrounded by rank-and-file tech workers in our industry’s growing labor movement — those stories are here, too. They’re being told right now, today, in offices and warehouses across this industry.

I can’t wait to see where those stories, and the people telling them, lead us next.

Let’s talk about tech unions

Join me and Mandy Brown for a free online discussion about my new book, You Deserve a Tech Union. It’s taking place on Thursday, October 19 2023, at 5pm PT / 8pm ET. We’ll be discussing the history of organizing in the tech industry, the challenges facing workers in our industry, and how unions are uniquely positioned to help us right now.

Most importantly: bring your own questions! We’re going to leave plenty of time for Q&A, and we’d love to hear from you.

Interested? You can RSVP for the event here!