Coders are The Factory Workers of the 21st Century

When industrialization came along and people moved from owning their own jobs or working in agriculture to working as employees in factories, the relationship between people and businesses changed. Instead of most people owning their own jobs and working as tradespeople with apprentices or a few employees, suddenly companies were hiring hundreds of people to perform different tasks. For the greater part of the industrial period, the people working in factories had no rights and were simply lucky to get paid and have some kind of steady job. There were no employee rights, a callous disregard for safety, and set time in working hours. It wouldn’t be until the early 20th century that labor would begin to make any gains in these areas. Labor organization stretches back to the 1850s and the Ludlow Massacre but no appreciable gains would be made in safety, working hours, or even days off until the 20th century and most of that progress happened during The Great Depression. 

For a while, Americans got used to having 2 days off, a 40 hour work week, 8-hour shifts, and later the addition of benefits like retirement pensions and healthcare. This system was in place thanks to labor unions and in 1960 49% of Americans were in a union of some kind. That number would quickly fall off in the years after. The Right to Work movement would begin, Ronald Reagan would break the back of organized labor, and most importantly, a generation of younger workers who had no idea of the deadly struggle to secure these now “common business practices” would agitate for greater freedom to work where and how they chose. Many of those who did not appreciate unions or stand behind them didn’t seemingly benefit from unions or worked in professions where unions were not common. Discount chains like Wal-Mart, Target, K-Mart, and others would lower prices by keeping labor costs low and paying their workers the local minimum wage (another depression-era reform). This would lead to wage stagnation, erosion of workers’ rights, and set up the modern employment hellscape that we now see before us. Wal-mart has been a lightning rod for their anti-union practices and closing stores where employees have tried to organize a union. The 2005 film, the High Cost of Low Prices filmed this process of employees trying to unionize at a Wal-mart and all the difficulties with that as well as how Wal-mart destroys communities. 

Then big tech came along.

In the tech industry, unionization has been virtually non-existent. This has been to the benefit of companies like Amazon, Uber, Lyft, Doordash, Instacart, and others who hire workers on an entirely casual basis and pay them little for the essential service of delivery. Tech workers, most white-collar, haven’t had much incentive to unionize. The pay is good for many and at the upper levels equity is also involved. However, as the tech giants have had to take on more front-line and rank and file workers, their loose employment policies and lack of employee support have become obvious. 

This week, Google employees, especially their contractors who moderate content for them on YouTube, are beginning to organize and form the beginnings of a union. The most important thing is that these workers are not blue-collar in the traditional sense but they are the blue-collar workers of the tech world. The tech world relies on people like content moderators to be the human touch behind their new innovations and solve problems that a line of code can’t easily solve. However, even among coders, there are rank and file coders who are essentially the factory workers of the 21st century. These roles are not the roles of the glamorous and revered geniuses like Musk, Zuckerberg, or Bezos. These workers are the people who painstakingly figure out how to create the visions of these men. They put the wheels on the car. They stamp the body parts. Only in the tech world, it’s a new ad placement, a new feature, or a freshened redesign. It is these workers, and they number in the millions who deserve fair compensation, fair practices, and representation to management. Most of them don’t really think that they need a union but as we can see that is beginning to change. 

Could this lead to great unionization in the tech world? It certainly should. Amazon is resisting the unionization of its warehouse employees although that would be a huge step in winning them the rights that they deserve. An Amazon warehouse is very similar to the terrible and unstable working environment that workers pre-1930s faced. The reality is that without organization, labor has no rights at any corporation. People died so that workers can have their employment (and their livelihood) decided fairly with clear rules that don’t rely on the discretion of corporate policy or managers. All workers deserve that right and these Google workers, many contractors with fewer protections than regular employees, are just the start. Hopefully, this will lead to a renaissance of the labor movement and it will lead to greater unionization of employees across tech and all industries.