{"id":8255,"date":"2022-04-22T10:27:55","date_gmt":"2022-04-22T07:27:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.liberalglobe.com\/?p=8255"},"modified":"2022-04-22T10:28:00","modified_gmt":"2022-04-22T07:28:00","slug":"a-%ce%bdew-wave-of-trade-labour-unionism-in-big-tech-companies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.liberalglobe.com\/?p=8255","title":{"rendered":"A \u039dew Wave of Trade-Labour Unionism in Big Tech Companies"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Christian Smalls has won a major battle against a company valued at an astronomical $ 1.7 trillion, more than the GDP of a country like Spain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Smalls has won a battle against a company that one of its executives described as “not very smart or eloquent” and which for years has had an extremely extensive legal and communication mechanism in place to prevent what it fears most: the emergence unions in their workplaces.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And yet Christian Smalls, who was fired in 2020 for organizing an informal protest against the need for security measures against the coronavirus, has managed to achieve something that in the past had failed with even the support of large unions: to ensure that warehouse where he worked would now be unionized.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And all this while the number of American unionized workers continues to decline – in 2021 it fell to 14 million or 10.3% as a percentage of unionized workers, with the proportion of unionized public sector workers being five times higher than that of the private sector (33.9% vs. 6.1%).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Why do companies not want trade unionism?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Deindustrialisation in specific areas and sectors, the geographical movement or relocation of production and extensive changes in the labor process have limited the possibility of trade union action.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This explains why industries such as teachers will now emerge as strongholds of trade unionism, at the same time as the expansion of trade unionism into “service” sectors will be hampered.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And of course the attitude of the companies will also play a role. This is reflected in the fact that giants like Amazon or Walmart do not want to have unions. This is often presented in a “paternalistic” tone, as the management of these companies claim that they “know better” than the unions what the needs of the employees are and that they “take care” of them better.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In fact, their problem is that the existence of unions will make it somewhat more difficult to enforce the demands of these companies in terms of intensive working hours and often exhausting hours and in terms of how they deal with fair pay given the huge profitability. their.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nor is it a coincidence that, especially in the US, employers’ associations and even large corporations spend very large sums of money lobbying to ensure that there is no state or federal legislation that is favorable to unions, or to discourage sectoral efforts. and businesses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Christian Smalls<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

The workplace is a stronghold of democracy<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

As has been written many times, unions are not just a pressure group. It is also a basic institution of democracy. They are based on the direct or indirect assumption that workplaces are places where power relations are unequal and where it must be ensured that those “below” have the right to be able to react in relation to what they are experiencing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Otherwise, we are dealing with spaces of a peculiar employer despotism, as if democracy had to stop at the entrance of workplaces.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After all, reality has shown that historically unions have not only been places that secured significant gains for workers, but also that they were not responsible for the problems faced by industries or companies and that they had much more to do with technological deficits, with inability to carry out the necessary restructuring or in the way companies managed their resources.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The issue of wage inequality<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

An interesting aspect that says a lot about who makes the decisions for employees in the US and perhaps explains their hostility to unions is the huge disparity between the salaries of executives and the salaries of an average employee.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

According to 2020 data, the average salary of a CEO was 351 times higher than that of an average employee and this is a ratio that is constantly increasing. In 1965 the ratio was 21 to 1, in 1989 61 to 1 and in 2019 307 to 1. This is compounded by the fact that the inequality in the concentration of wealth is constantly increasing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This gives rise to the feeling that resistance to union recognition has nothing to do both with trying to defend corporate finances and with administrations trying to maintain particularly challenging privileges and this condition of inequality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Big Tech companies do not like unions<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Big-tech companies often present themselves as “alternatives” and project a highly idealized picture of working conditions within them, as well as a particular community perception. A key point is that they are not traditional workplaces, but places of creation, communication and interaction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the same time it is one of the largest companies on the planet. In 2018, based on their market valuation, the five largest companies in the world were Apple, Amazon, Alphabet (Google), Microsoft and Facebook. All of them in one way or another have tried to avoid having unions within them, as Jane Mcalavey observes in her book A Collective Bargain, Unions, Organizing and the Fight for Democracy<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And one way they do this is by making extensive use of subcontractors, who often offer even worse working conditions. In fact, it is a common phenomenon that the use of employees in contractors does not concern other workplaces but the same corporate facilities resulting in people working in the same space and doing the same work belonging to different employers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Much work is still needed to achieve the goals<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In countries like the US, the increase in economic activity after the pandemic translated not only into a reduction in unemployment but also a large number of workers leaving their jobs to find better wages and conditions. There are plenty of examples of increased union activity and examples where employees like Christian Smalls can put up with giants like Amazon and make a profit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But overall, the situation is far from good. This has to do with the difficulties faced by the unions – many of them structured for a different working reality, the large resources available to employers but also the very large restructurings that fragment workers and do not easily allow the formation of a common identity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In any case, it is a battle that is expected to escalate in the coming years and be one of the fields where not only the dignity of work but also the quality of democracy will be judged.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Christian Smalls has won a major battle against a company valued at an astronomical $ 1.7 trillion, more than the GDP of a country…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[390,819],"tags":[3240,3446,3448,3447],"class_list":["post-8255","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","category-usa","tag-amazon","tag-big-tech-companies","tag-trade-unionism","tag-workers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.liberalglobe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8255","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.liberalglobe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.liberalglobe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.liberalglobe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.liberalglobe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8255"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.liberalglobe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8255\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8262,"href":"https:\/\/www.liberalglobe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8255\/revisions\/8262"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.liberalglobe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8255"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.liberalglobe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8255"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.liberalglobe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8255"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}