The Making of the Tech Worker Movement

by Ben Tarnoff

In recent years, a wave of rank-and-file mobilization has swept the tech industry. Tech workers are engaging in collective action at a range of companies, around a range of issues. It is no exaggeration to say that a tech worker movement is taking shape.

Where did this movement come from? What are its principal dynamics, and how do they fit together? And why did a well-paid layer of white-collar professionals come to play so active a role in it?

These are a few of the questions explored in The Making of the Tech Worker Movement. This is a story about how a movement was made, and how it remade the people who participated in it, as they struggled to remake one of the most powerful industries in the world.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Technology

47 pages

Published May 4, 2020

About the author

Ben Tarnoff is a tech worker, writer, and co-founder of Logic Magazine. His most recent book is Voices from the Valley: Tech Workers Talk About What They Do—and How They Do It, co-authored with Moira Weigel. He has written for the New York Times, the Guardian, the New Republic, and Jacobin.

Reviews

[juch · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’m not a tech worker but know many haha. And identify w being a PMC white collar worker whatever. I feel like I’ve been around ppl dismissing tech worker organizing bc they’re privileged, or felt the impulse to dismiss my own organizing, but this pamphlet makes a compelling case re what we have to learn about organizing a “contradictory” class status. Namely, that it’s an opportunity to expand “self interest” beyond things like compensation - toward decision making power, against the profit motive that incentives companies to profit off incarceration and genocide and to “proleterianize”/subcontract more and more types of work (esp w AI!)

I felt moved to think outside of privilege discourse and instead ask, how can I use my position to be a part of the workers movement and jam the gears of capital? There’s some beautiful theoretical language about how class is made through struggle not found, I cannot replicate it now but maybe I will transcribe later :)

Moving that sharing bosses / space w service workers who organized themselves first is smth that politicized white collar workers! Though it ends kinda quickly on “we need to follow working class leadership,” I wanted more examples of the messiness of coalition building

[Matteo Saxena Rossi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tarnoff gives a concise and coherent analysis of one aspect of the continuously unfolding tech workers' movement. I found the work to be accessible and, for my own research, really informative. My only critique is that there aren't any accessible citations. I would like to see another version that has sources cited in addition to the clarifying footnotes.

[Ray · Rating 4 out of 5]

Solid summary of the past few years of events.