Can Silicon Valley workers rein in big tech from within?
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Does the company you're currently working for have a union?
As it happens, I did not have any difficulty finding another job.
I had interviews with several companies within four weeks of being fired (despite spending a great deal of time cooperating with the NLRB investigation in addition to job hunting). I was sitting at my desk at a new job less than eight weeks after being fired.
I worked with a recruiter, who was not particularly interested in why my last employer had terminated me after hearing that all non-supervisory engineers had been terminated. I don't know whether the recruiter shopped me around to employers who decided to pass on me for having supported a union.
When asked by prospective employers why I'd left my last job I replied that the company had characterized the situation as a "lay off" of all engineers due to a "change in direction". I was never pressed for more information. One employer brought up unions in an oblique way, presumably because they'd googled my name and read coverage of the case. They made me an offer anyway.
My former coworkers, none of whom went public the way I did while looking for a job, didn't seem to have any problems either. I believe all but one have found new jobs better than or comparable to their old jobs. No employer could know who did and did not support the union, so everyone but me had plausible deniability. To my knowledge none were asked about it.
The company I'm working for now is a fairly typical media company and is not unionized.
If not, could you talk about why not?
People have problems at work all the time; they usually try to solve them as individuals. Sometimes that works, more often it doesn't -- they just come to expect less out of life.
At Lanetix, collective action was well underway by the time I became involved. The real catalyst of organization was the firing of an excellent engineer who had become the de facto spokesperson for grievances in one office (see: https://gist.github.com/bwestergard/a5ddc5583d37554cc40a0e2b...). It was only after management's effort to suppress a collective response that I became involved. I was one of several who advocated for the NLRA route; I would not have done so in any "hot shop" situation.
Those who say yes when asked to engage in profit-generating yet morally ambiguous or immoral behaviors will rise and be rewardedm; those who say no will be marginalized and removed.
This is an essentially inevitable outcome for anything other than a nonprofit or benefit corp. Witness the decay of Google's moral compass, and more recently, the outright contempt for ethics at darlings like Uber.
This is why we have governments with the power to enact regulations. I'd like to think no one still believes in any sort of market fundamentalism that believes firms will self-regulate against their own financial interest.