All bosses are bastards. Let's fight them.
It is not normal or natural for your boss to make a thousand times your salary.
It is not normal or natural for you to have to suck up to managers and put down coworkers in "360 reviews".
It is not normal or natural for you to have to shed any love for people, the earth, or social justice when you clock in.
It is not normal or natural for you to expect to be harassed, belittled, lied to, or worse in the workplace.
There is no evil in the world that tech hasn't either created or exacerbated. Even relatively harmless tech jobs tend to automate work while making founders and investors rich. We contribute to inequality, which is not a neutral outcome. Individually, most of us are kind and considerate, but the incentives of our work demands ignoring our impact too often. We can change this, but we have to do it together.
How many conversations do we need to have about editors, languages, and coding patterns? Should we be content working from agile methodology from 30 years ago that says our deepest purpose is to deliver quality software to anyone who can pay for it?
We built surveillance tech. We built tech for war. We built the gig economy. We built tech for environmental destruction. We built discriminatory algorithms.
I don't think most of us want to build these things. And I think there is good work to be done in connecting people and making things more efficient, but this work, without the drawbacks above is rare. Mostly, the purposes we've built for aren't ours.
This is a list of basics about unions, coops, things that don't work, and resources.
Glitch and Kickstarter are both organized with the CWA. It's free to talk to them about organizing your workplace.
Before you go public with your union and go for a vote, you'll likely spend a lot of time getting to know your coworkers better.
This includes "mapping" your workplace and coworkers, which means:
After you get enough people, you can start escalating the campaign. This is where partnering with a union like CWA or other experienced organizers would be very helpful.
At the end of this process, you'll be recognized by the NLRB (National Labor Relations Board) and negotiate a "contract" which will have better terms than the "contract" you likely had very little control over when becoming an employee.
You don't have to have a majority or be recognized by the NLRB to improve working conditions through collective action.
Non-majority unions can also be organized with the CWA, as in the Alphabet Workers Union.
For a discussion of solidarity unionism, check here.
Some people use this term informally to refer to a "flat" organization or one that has some amount of profit sharing.
Here, a broader description is intended: "democracy in the workplace" is a way of beginning this idea. For a fuller elaboration and ideas for how to pursue a worker owned cooperative, I would recommend looking into Democracy at Work. For an overview of the broader social reasons for this, the founder discusses it in this video.
It is possible and unfortunately common for people to take the lesson from bad experiences in the corporate world that things would be better if they were the boss. This might be true, but if you succeed wildly, you might end up responding to some of the same boss pressures above, reproducing the same oppressive workplaces that you were looking to escape. If you reject unionization or a coop conversion, you have put on the suit of a bastard. If you want to scale your individual efforts, consider horizontal approaches like coops.
Why would the next job be any better? The salary or other benefits might be better. Maybe the honeymoon period will be pleasant. But if the incentives and hierarchies resemble the last job, the same issues are likely to be there, even if hidden at first. No matter how good a boss seems, at some point, an opportunity to restructure, grow, produce more, cut costs, sell, IPO, or impress investors will reintroduce the same pressures. An industry standard for employee welfare does not and will never exist.
Further, "democracy" in the workplace does not exist. Whatever prejudices and excesses we have in society will be, at minimum present, but more likely worse, inside of any corporate structure.
There is no shame in fleeing a "toxic" workplace. The problem is that every workplace threatens being or becoming toxic in ways that are out of your control.
One person cannot change an organization. It doesn't work. You may be able to launch an initiative to, for example "hire and promote more women", but if your organization is structured in a hierarchy, you will necessarily pass over hundreds of resumes for every person you hire.
You might be perfectly trained for the most clear critique of organizational practices that are detrimental to society, privacy, or the environment. You can even be praised for your role in holding people accountable. And just like, Timnit Gebru, you can be fired for exactly what you're good at.
The trend of capital is to accumulate. The trend of labor rights is to be diminished. The only thing that has worked to securing union protections, the weekend, 40 hour workweeks, etc. has been direct confrontation. With rare exceptions, politicians only bend on these issues when they are forced. Labor struggles has a place in electoral politics, but the first goal is to create a sufficiently powerful coalition to demand something of politicians. Appealing to their good nature does nothing when bosses fund their campaigns.
Companies occasionally perform supportive actions for marginalized groups, greenwash, or otherwise signal that they are on the right side of social causes and history. These are best understood as cynical and hypocritical efforts to attract talent, investment, or customers. The second that any of these putative commitments (or any of a similar basis given to individuals) comes into conflict with making money, rather than supporting it, it will be dropped as quickly as possible. A company is not a moral agent, no matter how good the individuals are who make it up.
It is a waste of time to wonder if statements like these (as well as any "company values") are held sincerely. Without consequences (a law, a strike, significant reputational damage) for violations, a company cannot be bound.
Here is a big list of coops and resources.
If I missed your favorite resource or you have any questions, my DMs are open as is my inbox.