[What happened to Twitter could happen to any Silicon Valley
company. ]
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TECH COMPANY WORKERS SHOULD UNIONIZE IMMEDIATELY  
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Ryan Cooper
November 7, 2022
The American Prospect
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_ What happened to Twitter could happen to any Silicon Valley
company. _

If Twitter employees had unionized years ago, they would have many
more ways to protect both themselves and their company., JEFF CHIU/AP
PHOTO

 

To any observer of the media industry over the last decade, Elon
Musk’s purchase of Twitter resembles nothing so much as a warp-speed
recreation of a private equity–bought newspaper
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The Wall Street bloodsucker scoops up the paper using debt that is
placed on the paper’s own balance sheet, its real estate and
everything else that isn’t nailed down is sold off, employee head
count is slashed to conserve funds to service the debt, and prices are
jacked up. The paper dies, but in the meantime the private equity
goons collect a quick profit before readers notice they are paying a
lot more for a much worse product and cancel their subscriptions.

The differences in this case are that Musk hugely overpaid
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Twitter—$44 billion, or probably about three to four times what the
chronically unprofitable website was actually worth—and he is
ruining it so fast that it seems highly unlikely that he will get any
money out of it at all. On the contrary, his external financing puts
the company on the hook for more in interest payments alone
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it previously made in net revenue. Two impulsive decisions to sack
the whole executive team
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the employees
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without following proper legal procedures have already led to big
legal headaches.

The most obvious lesson here is that it is socially and economically
poisonous to allow any person to become as rich as Musk. When a single
oligarch can snatch up one of the world’s most important arteries of
communications on a random whim, tear it to shreds while losing tens
of billions of dollars, but only dent his net worth by about as much
as an upper-middle-class family taking a long vacation to Thailand,
taxes are far too low.

But another lesson is that tech company workers should all form unions
immediately. If Twitter employees had unionized years ago, they would
have many more ways to protect both themselves and their company from
deranged, predatory oligarchs—indeed, if they were unionized, Musk
might not have bought Twitter in the first place.

First and most obviously, unions can secure collective-bargaining
agreements giving workers higher pay, better benefits, and contractual
protections to improve job security. Common contract provisions
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specific job description details, a scheme of paid family and sick
leave, requirements that terminations be for cause, and so on.

So a unionized worker could refuse to obey Musk’s erratic commands
that radically changed their job descriptions or forced them to work
more than 80 hours per week. If he fired them anyway, they could take
their case to the National Labor Relations Board and demand
restitution. The NLRB is not nearly as powerful as some labor agencies
in other countries, but it can still order that workers be reinstated
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back pay, with escalating fines should bosses continue to break the
law. (And its new management under Biden has been increasingly
emboldened
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Second, unionization provides a more nebulous form of collective
strength. Organizers testify
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going through a union drive changes the way workers think about each
other and society, by strengthening bonds between colleagues and
inspiring broader political participation. Individual, atomized
workers who don’t know their colleagues are easier to bully and
fire, since others will tend to keep their heads down out of fear.
Workers who have internalized “an injury to one is an injury to
all” will be more ready to fight back.

For instance, employees can stop working, either by going on strike or
by engaging in a work slowdown. Many union contracts contain a
“no-strike” clause, but there’s no reason new unions couldn’t
reject such a clause, or grind the company to a halt by working
poorly—for instance, by stupidly following every instruction to the
letter. Fundamentally, every company depends on its workers to carry
out its most basic functions, and that is probably truer of tech
companies. Every firm has numerous highly specialized and highly
technical departments fully understood by only a handful of people
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and even if owners like Musk grasp one of them (they don’t), nobody
could possibly understand them all.

In short, unions give workers a decent amount of influence over how a
business is operated, and therefore reduce the power of bosses and
owners. Musk very likely would have thought twice about buying Twitter
if it had had a strong union.

In my experience, tech workers are often resistant to the idea of
unionization because they tend to be paid very well. But high pay in
itself doesn’t mean they still aren’t being ripped off relative to
the value they are producing for the company. The fact that companies
like Alphabet
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(until recently) Meta churn out enormous profits, and their executives
are rich beyond the dreams of avarice, is proof of that. Even if a
software engineer is making well into the six figures, the fact that
so much money is pooling at the top of the company shows that owners
are capturing far too much of the corporate surplus.

Setting pay aside, tech workers are also notoriously overworked
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Silicon Valley has long had a culture of hustling that really just
amounts to exploitation, and unions could help greatly with work-life
balance.

At any rate, time may be very short. Meta is still currently
profitable, but its megalomaniac chieftain Mark Zuckerberg has cut its
profitability in half with a madcap $15 billion crusade
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get office workers to wear VR helmets, with no sign of stopping.
Alphabet is doing better, but its stock price is still down by nearly
half from its peak.

Matt Yglesias reports
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the Silicon Valley oligarchy is suddenly convinced that every tech
company is overstaffed by 50 to 90 percent. We are getting a natural
test of this right now with Twitter, and if the judgment of technical
experts
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anything to go by, the results are not promising. But as the behavior
of Musk himself shows, people like him are unlikely to listen to
reason.

If tech workers want to keep their jobs, they would be wise to
unionize, and quick. And while we’re at it, the users who provide
all the content and the lion’s share of the value for social media
sites might want to think about unionizing too, lest their
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followings and favorite posts also fall victim to the whims of some
oligarch doofus.

_RYAN COOPER is the Prospect’s managing editor, and author of How
Are You Going to Pay for That?: Smart Answers to the Dumbest Question
in Politics
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was previously a national correspondent for The Week. His work has
also appeared in The Nation, The New Republic, and Current
Affairs._

Used with the permission © The American Prospect, Prospect.org
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Read the original article at Prospect.org.
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