Cory Doctorow

Because tech workers thought that they were temporarily embarrassed founders.

They didn't think that they were workers.

And they thought that because their bosses would meet them in monthly town hall meetings where they could ask impertinent questions about corporate strategy, that their bosses thought that they were peers.

But your boss didn't think you were a peer.

Your boss thought you were a problem to solve.

And after half a million layoffs in the tech sector, they're not afraid of you anymore.

There's other workers who will take your job.

You can no longer say, I refuse to un-shitify that thing I missed my mother's funeral to ship, and you can't hire someone else to replace me, because they'll just fire you and hire someone else to replace you.

And so now is the time to unionize.

And it can... Yes?

And so, you know, it might feel like a bad time to be unionizing because we no longer have the National Labor Relations Board as it was constituted under Biden.

In fact, it's been so illegally denuded of commissioners that it can no longer form a quorum and investigate unfair labor practices.

So it can feel like this is a bad time.

But here's the category error Trump is making.

Trump thinks that the reason we have unions is because we have the National Labor Relations Act.

It's backwards, right?

Long before unions were legal, we had unions, right?

And the union piece represented by the National Labor Relations Act was brought about because bosses were scared of what their workers were doing to them at that point because militancy had gotten so intense that they sued for peace.

And that peace came in two parts.

Part of the National Labor Relations Act describes what your boss can't do to you, but a lot of the National Labor Relations Act is about what you can't do to your boss.