Location: Room 1301 — Conrad Grebel University College, 140 Westmount Rd. N. · Waterloo, ON N2L 3G6 (bottom floor, in the hallway that connects the main building to the Chapel-Residence building)
Date: Monday, 12 November 2018
Time: 7:00-9:00PM
Is automation taking over Systems Administration? Are highly skilled SysAdmin jobs (and their highly skilled SysAdmins) becoming obsolete? What is to become of the Non-Profit SysAdmin? Are we all going to become Mechanical Turks? Or should tech workers become Wobblies? Who are the Wobblies? Is the tech industry ready for collective action?
We’re joined by special guest Sean Howard at our round table to discuss the state of the tech industry, the working conditions for tech workers, and what can be done about it.
–Marc Paré & Bob Jonkman
Tech Wobblies/Meeting Notes 2018-11-12
Resources
- Part of the CBC Ideas series Workshift.
- Industrial Workers of the World | One Big Union!
- Tech Workers Coalition
- It’s Time To Unionize In Silicon Valley – The Awl
- Kate Dawson’s presentation: Cooperative Technologists
- !Fediverse notice about an app called Wobbly
- Big Tech’s sell-off – Schumpeter | The Economist — with special attention to the last paragraph of the article!
Meeting Notes
- Introductions
- Steve has an IWW membership card from 1975!
- and Sunny has a modern card, with self-adhesive stickers representing dues (from $11 – $33/month)
- IWW goal is to be a self-funded union.
- Money to do projects: training on workplace organizing, &c.
- Having a budget is useful
- No outside influence if self-funded.
- Similar to a self-managed business or a co-op
- all funding goes back into the IWW
- kwiww.wordpress.com (needs some updating)
- Techworkers Coalition is less formal, anyone can join
- Orgininally, unions were based on trades
- Now, divided by region (Toronto, Kitchener-Waterloo)
- But tech workers have their own needs, so now splitting that off again
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- The larger techworkers union can encompass Toronto, KW, North Bay
- IWW has general membership branches, divided by region, not by trade
- Has strength in Ontario from lumber industry, based on migrant workers, who had no access to trade unions
- With many workers working and living together they will (can?) self-organize
- Talk things over about how employers are treating workers.
- Most trade unions don’t accept contractors in their union, contractors == scabs
- IWW accepts contractors in their union, any worker
- The union will accept contractors, and negotiate for
- But it’s different for off-site contractors, but the IWW could handle that
- IWW also operates in areas where there’s no jurisdiction for trade unions
- No framework for industrial organizing in Canada (or the States)
- Union for a workplace is for collective bargaining; a trade union may provide union training
- IWW puts techworkers under “Communications”
- Setting standards for all techworkers in any workplace
- Good for small, scattered workplaces
- For techworkers, not so much for negotiating pay, but perhaps oncall or overtime hours
- eg. Google walkout for sexual harrassment; influenced other corporations like Facebook
- Making small changes in one place will filter to other places
- But some grievances aren’t satisfied by one corporation; if one company doesn’t do it, another one will
- This sounds more like a social justice action — and that’s the whole point.
- Critical mass?
- Needs 10 people to form a formal industrial union branch (IUB).
- (that’s an IWW requirement)
- Needs 10 people to form a formal industrial union branch (IUB).
- Note that IWW is not Techworkers Coalition
- Techworkers Coalition started in the California Bay area, from gameworker’s union.
- Loose organization, no formal membership
- Provides a place to discuss grievances, solutions, and expand that to larger nationwide discussions
- “Low obligation” way to get involved,
- Sign up for Techworker’s Coalition on their website, get access to their Slack channel
- No dues, no voting…
- Techworker’s Coalition Meetup on Sat 17 Nov from 3-6pm at East York Civic Centre
- IWW and Techworker’s Coalition share values, but IWW has a budget, and “real union” power to back the workers
- Labour laws require employers to negotiate with unions once there is sufficient membership
- Some progress in Montreal in fast food industry, precarious work.
- Has low union membership density, so a good target for organizing
- In Montreal some demands were met wihtout a contract; in US formal contracts are in place.
- But no contracts are preferred to avoid legal battles
- Certification as a union? Get certain numbers of people to sign union cards; protection from dismissal for union activity
- Improved working conditions, improved control over the work\
- Building block for social change
- Difficult co-op to get union affilliation
- In order to get recognized there needs to be a boss and workers, but that’s not part of a co-op. Workaround: A board of directors.
- But big unions (Unifor) is not interested in worker control
- But worker control over labour is the point of IWW
- Is Unifor subsuming the work of IWW?
- Well! Not really, Unifor is not working for the workers, although their literature would say otherwise. There is antagonism between Unifor and other unions.
- Unifor has left the CLC
- CLC is a social justice organization
- Unifor’s politics are not those of the IWW
-
- The IWW locals are autonomous, the IWW is run by the locals from the bottom up (unlike other unions)
- Other unions profit from the workers not knowing about the union
-
- (discussion on union raiding, agitating, organizing)
- IWW practices “solidarity unionism”, everyone signs on and becomes involved
- Other unions dictate conditions to the workers
- Many parallels to political parties: there are top-down, big-tent parties, and bottom-up, grass-roots parties
- Maybe the trade unions did start off as bottom-up, but when they grew large that level of communication interfered with that model
- How can IWW prevent that?
- Direction the labour movement has taken in the last 50 years: different trade unions got amalgamated, and grew into monstrous beasts
- Large unions are affected by back-to-work legislation: How does that provide protection to the workers? This is entrenched in Canadian labour legislation
- “If you’re really big no-one wants to pick a fight with you”
- Very little gains have been made in the last 50 years
- When organizations get too large, the executive takes over
- Now things are speedy and novel that organizations don’t have a chance to make mistakes — how to keep up the communications-expensive organizational model of IWW?
- Local KW branch of IWW is try9ing to pull out tech workers based on their unique needs.
- But that will grow and build bureaucracy
- Ontario labour law has many exemptions for techworkers (12 hour days, no overtime protection, &c)
- When a local organization gets large enough, the IWW fragments it into their own bureaucratic structure; fragmentation is built in to prevent over-size organizations
- This model has been demonstrated many times, in many different sectors, throughout IWW existence
- eg. Russian Bolsheviks, labour union in Spain
- IWW has been doing this for 100 years
- IU == Industrial Unions
- CNTU == Quebec-based federation of unions
- Closed union shops?
- Based on legislation at the close of WWII
- Everyone must pay dues to prevent the “free rider” problem
- SysAdmins not well represented by, eg. Steelworkers union
- Create a separate bargaining unit, in the same union?
- When bargained contracts are unequal the Ontario Labour Relations board gets involved.
- IWW allows membership in multiple unions!
- But that may create more borders between workers, looks disorganized to the employers
- Bargaining units could be as small as two or three people
- eg. Waterloo Region example of shed-builders: Two people certified a union, now it’s a closed shop.
- Politicians in WR are working to prevent the ill effects of closed shops and the bidding process.
- Are we going to get bids as cheaply as possible, or are we going to ensure a fair wage for workers? This is determined by who we elect into office to set labour law. (but who gets to vote based on this one issue?)
- In IWW there are people opposed to the closed shop model
- Closed shops may be a trap for unions: “We’re done organizing now”
- But that doesn’t provide flexibility when new classes of work appear, new workers are needed
- Unions become unresponsive to needs of new workers in new work
- Union amalagamation is not responsive to small changes
- In some union elections the offices are almost always contested
- because the workers are involved
- Everyone informed, everyone involved, everyone having a say is the essence of solidarity unionism
- Contracting out shouldn’t matter, as long as the workers have the same working conditions
- But this may not work for off-site work, eg. contracted at-home workers
- Need to be in contact with your fellow workers to keep up with the needs of workers
- What kind of response has IWW got from the SysAdmin community?
- People have been coming out to meetings!
- Sunny looking to set up an Industrial Union, not a workplace union.
- Lots of media attention to collective action, eg. Salesforce workers want the company to divest from ICE; sexual harrassment walkout; anti-war, peace work
- Happening everywhere, but centered in the Bay Area
- Want organizations that are not employer-centric or industry-centric
- Want to be able to critize the hand that feeds us
- eg. funding organizations don’t provide funding to non-profit organizations involved in well-off industries
- Co-op sector is very much aligned with the values and philosophies of IWW
- Why does IWW pursue the union model, not the worker-owned model?
- IWW does both
- Unions have a history of making radical, industry-wide changes, eg. invented the weekend
- Co-ops may not make such big chagnes for workers
- And co-op workers are workers too!
- LibraInformation Systems is a co-op that is unionized; very big, lots of contracts
- Maybe workers can buy their distressed companies and form a co-op
- False dichotomy between co-ops and unions. Other countries with histories of worker-based actions are more open to co-op/union fusion
(mondregon in spain?)
- Co-ops have been failing because of lack of capital & cashflow
- IWW has facilitated communication between different unions in the same sector where employer was pitting one union against the other
- Unionizing the trade unions? Union workers are workers too!