Jacob was just a regular old software engineer. His free time was spent playing competitive badminton, collecting pencil drawings, and trying to keep his mind off work. Jacob found early on in his workplace early days that trying to smash away a nickname like a badminton birdie caused it to return every time with a little more force and sticking power. So Jack it was, to pretty much everyone else. What kind of company has an email nomenclature that includes the first three letters of your name and the first letter of your middle name?? jack@muraliosh.com definitely sent the wrong message. But the IT bureaucrats were not interested in his pleas of mis-naming. That was the first strike.
Strike two was even more banal. Muraliosh (what are we, a wall painting combined with a many-ingredient stew??) started putting chicory coffee in the machines. Chicory was something that used to get added to coffee when a long journey meant you could only bring along so many beans and you wanted them to last longer. Apparently their ridiculously well-funded journey was going to be much, much lengthier and more droll, even after the lock-up period ended and all those paper millionaires become real ones. Half of Jacob’s colleagues seemed to have taken up the art of coffee, competing in aeropress competitions (what??) and bragging about the home-roasting of single origin beans that they gathered by hand on ecotourism vacations. Jacob missed the boat, by a wide margin. And coworker coffee antics and break-time buying sprees didn’t support his penny pinching but coffee consuming body.
The final straw, the foreign hair that broke this giraffe’s neck, was far from banal. Jacob found out that Muraliosh had entered into a semi-formal arrangement with two of the other largest employers of software & design talent in town to affix a ceiling and a mean to wages. Jacob read on the Internet that public prosecutors had declined to make a case because the state’s laws were not quite clear enough of the allowability of the practice.
So Jacob read the histories and philosophies of the union organizers of the past and present. The speculative pieces by radical economists and sociologists about the transformative power of an ascendant working class. The reality that the working class was not ascendant in any sense of the word in convincing articles. Leverage, how one gets it without owning equity or holding the right side of a debt agreement. And he very, very quietly got started. The first principle of union building, clearly, was to remember that management did not want them to exist. Specialist union-busting consulting firms raked it in when press releases and tweets announced impending formations or votes. Decades of concerted lobbying and political theory had been developed to prevent the creation and maintenance of unions. So Jacob, convinced that organizing his colleagues would be the only way to achieve the satisfaction he needed, kept it under wraps. To the point of using encrypted messaging apps and only ever communicating bilaterally. Who knew when a stooge of the boss mind look to jump the ladder by ratting the nascent group out to the Chief People Officer (a fancy title for a specialty legal division meant to control the workforce).
After bringing together about fifteen percent of his company into a generally agreed upon framework, from enough functions and deep enough into the depth charts to have surpassed the “now you have leverage” line, Jacob cautiously reached out to the other companies in town. He helped those who responded enthusiastically take the same tack to quietly organizing, and one of the companies got a full thirty percent of the workforce to join the union. That’s what you get when you don’t offer the people who work for you equity, Jacob thought. A little stake in the outcome and it would have been so much harder to get everyone on board with the fact of their alienation from decision-making and upside-remuneration. So there they stood, on a precipice. Organized sufficiently to get things rolling, nervously waiting to make the very first move. Their jobs would not be protected if they went on a strike, but the bet was that there were enough of them that the local country club executive cabal would not have a choice but to respond. Jacob had loaded up a series of marketing efforts meant to shame the leadership of each company when they inevitably brought in the union-breaker mercenaries – the local airport was about to unfurl banners unwelcoming these people before they even bought their tickets to town.
So it began with a newspaper article. Not only from the local paper, either. Jacob had coordinated with the town rag and The Guardian to bring immediate international attention to the situation. Full court press from the beginning without pausing until the demands were met. Groups of children singing solidarity carols in front of the board members’ houses. A clear articulation of what was needed: the resignations of everyone involved in the wage-fixing scandal, the appointment (as in Germany) of worker representatives on all the company boards, and an equity-sharing plan, each implemented within sixty days. And the unique skill sets of the members of this union came in handy. Pretty much all the ads on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google for the companies in question were beaten on the ad markets for a single day by the ads placed by the union highlighting the issues with their companies directly to prospective and existing customers. Jacob was careful to ensure that the relationships with customers were not necessarily permanently sullied. The ask was simple – we already make good products, and we’ll make better ones for you when we, the people building the things you’re buying, are satisfactorily treated.
Nearly all the companies capitulated to most of the demands. The board membership point was only agreed upon by one of the companies (as their board emptied out when all the execs involved in the wage-fixing resigned – talk about a principal-agent problem). Jacob’s company fought tooth and nail. They worked to ferret out the members of the union organizing committee, with the identity of Jacob revealed after their herculean efforts to dig through every personal phone that had a work application on them (damn those app permissions). When all of the employees of his firm walked out after they fired Jacob, not even just the union members, the retrenched managers relented. Theirs wasn’t a business that could bring in scabs – too much tribal knowledge in all that code and customer relationship management. Jacob was offered his job back to save the company, but he had already accepted a better offer from one of the other companies in town. But the entire executive team eventually was forced out by their board after a common shareholder revolt (the dangers of going public with too much of your equity).
When the employee share ownership plans were implemented, the unions didn’t have a strong enough raison d’être to exist on a company by company basis, but there was a strong argument to be made for another worker-oriented global association to check against the over-balanced power of organizations over their employees. So the association gained a singular title and re-invigorated a cross-company union membership that traveled with people between companies and gigs. And while the power differential between labor and capital was not reset in a Leninist way, there is at least now a public defender for a cause that had seemed entirely lost.
Roman Ryan 