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submitted 11 months ago by pluralistic@mamot.fr to c/random@kbin.run

We're living in the #enshittocene, in which the forces of enshittification are turning everything from our cars to our streaming services to our dishwashers into thoroughly enshittifified piles of shit. Call it the Great Enshittening:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/09/lead-me-not-into-temptation/#chamberlain

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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/13/solidarity-forever/#tech-unions

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[-] pluralistic@mamot.fr 1 points 11 months ago

When Google lays off 12,000 tech workers just months after a stock buyback that would have paid their wages for the next 27 years, they deliver two benefits to their shareholders. It's not just the short-term gains from the financial engineering - there's the long-term gain of gutting worker power and stripping away the final impediment to enshittification:

No matter how strong an individual tech worker's bargaining power was, it was always brittle.

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[-] pluralistic@mamot.fr 1 points 11 months ago

Long before googlers were being laid off in five-digit cohorts, they were working in an environment where harassment and predation were just part of the job. The 20,000+ googlers who walked off the job in 2018 were an important step towards replacing the system where each tech worker's power was limited to their moment-to-moment importance to their bosses' plans with a new system based on a collective identity.

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[-] pluralistic@mamot.fr 1 points 11 months ago

Only through collective action and solidarity - unions - could tech workers hope to truly resist all the moral injuries of their bosses enshittification imperatives. No surprise then, that tech unions are on the rise:

But what is a little surprising - and very heartening! - is what happens when techies start to self-identify as workers: they come to understand that they share common cause with the other workers at the bottom of the tech stack.

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[-] ukuku@mstdn.social 1 points 11 months ago

@pluralistic@mamot.fr yes!!!

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this post was submitted on 13 Jan 2024
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