Cory Doctorow

Someone in the reception before this asked me about what advice I would give to tech workers.

And statistically, a bunch of you are probably tech workers.

So the tech workers did have this chance to consolidate their power, and they missed it.

So for a long time, one of the forces that constrain in shitification

was workers themselves.

Because tech workers are this uniquely constituted workforce historically.

The tech sector has always had very low union density, but an enormous amount of worker power.

And that's because tech workers were both very scarce and very, very valuable.

The National Bureau of Economic Research estimates that the average tech worker in Silicon Valley and Seattle was adding a million dollars a year to their employer's bottom line.

That's why they gave you free kombucha and massages and why they'd hire a surgeon to freeze your eggs so you could work through your fertile years.

It wasn't because they loved you.

It was because they were afraid of you getting a job across the street.

Now, we know how tech bosses treat the workers they're not afraid of losing.

That's the Amazon driver who's got the AI camera that takes points off if they look away from the road to check something to one side or the other and it decides that their eyeballs were in the wrong orientation.

It's the warehouse workers that are injured at three times the rate of other warehouse workers in the sector.

It's everyone who pees in a bottle

It's people who assemble iPhones in China and have suicide nets around the factory, right?

That's how they treat the workers they're not afraid of.

So there was this opportunity at one point for tech workers to use that power and consolidate it through a union.

And they missed it, right?