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this post was submitted on 13 Jan 2024
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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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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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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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@pluralistic@mamot.fr yes!!!