Organizing Tech Workers and Recoding Power: interview with Sidney Rothstein

Sidney Rothstein, assistant professor of political science at Williams College, recently published the book Recoding Power: Tactics for Mobilizing Tech Workers by Oxford University Press. In the book, he analyzes how tech workers have developed new tactics for collective action and exercising power in the workplace.

Drawing on empirical studies in four technology companies in the United States and Germany, he highlights the role of discourse at the heart of worker organizing tactics. The creativity in these organizational tactics can help in what Rothstein calls recoding power. Thus, he demonstrates possibilities for organizing workers in the tech sector.

In an interview with Rafael Grohmann, Sidney Rothstein talked about the tricky conceptualization of tech workers, the differentiation between resources and power, what is new in tech industry struggles, what it means recoding power, organizational tactics, role of discourse and lessons learned from Alphabet Workers Union.

DIGILABOUR: The definition around tech workers can be tricky. How do you conceptualize them?

SIDNEY ROTHSTEIN: I generally think that people should be called whatever they want to be called, but it’s true that defining “tech workers” presents some challenges. On the one hand, you can define them in terms of occupation, which could lead us to define everyone who works with computers as a tech worker. This would include lots of people we ordinarily wouldn’t think of as tech workers, like programmers who write code for lumber yards or maybe an IT administrator at a dental office. On the other hand, you could use sector instead, and include everyone who works for tech firms, though this would also include lots of people who do many different things. At Facebook, for instance, this would include software developers, but also security guards and bus drivers.

In Recoding Power, I use a definition I think will be most useful for building solidarity among the working class. So, for me, it’s important for the label to be as inclusive as possible and to group people in a way that makes it easier for them to organize. I chose the sectoral approach because the “tech sector” is imbued with a particular history, which is often what people at least implicitly refer to when they say, “I’m a tech worker.” The whole mythology and iconography of Silicon Valley (two guys in a garage, hoodies, etc.), however kitsch at this point, can still provide the basis for a common identity or common point of reference – especially where they fail to actually apply to real life. The other reason to go with a sectoral approach is that it often applies to workers in the same firm, or who at least work with each other regularly, and that proximity can provide the basis for organizing.

DIGILABOUR: You differentiate resources from power. What would that difference be, and specifically in the case of tech workers?

ROTHSTEIN: In talking to tech workers, and to other people about tech workers, there’s a frequent pattern you hear, which is that many think tech workers have power when they don’t, and that they don’t have power when they do. This is because of the tendency to confuse resources with power. Tech workers often think they’re powerful because they can demand high salaries and generous benefits, and, when the labor market is tight, they get what they ask for. But this isn’t power. It’s just that, at that particular juncture, workers have access to a resource. Because when the economy tanks and the labor market disintegrates, it turns out that they don’t have much leverage against management. And it’s in situations like this that workers then think they’re powerless, even though they’re not.

What I show in Recoding Power is that tech workers can actually be much more powerful than they perhaps thought at first pass, though they’re also not as invincible as they might think – but you can only see this if you distinguish power from resources. Power has to be built. Your ability to demand a high salary because your boss wants your skills right now is not power. You can see that during economic downturns, because you’ll be fired like everyone else once the boss doesn’t need your skills. But, like all workers, tech workers can organize, and they can mobilize against management discretion to protect their jobs. I show that even where it looks impossible, workers can mobilize. It takes creativity, close analysis, and collective action but that’s exactly what tech workers are really good at.

DIGILABOUR: What’s new in the struggles and power of tech workers in recent years?

ROTHSTEIN: Overall, I’d say that labor struggles in tech have become louder, bigger, and cooler. First, tech workers have been organizing for decades, like at IBM in the 1980s and at Microsoft in the 1990s, but for whatever reason, we’re hearing about it more now – which is good, and probably inspires other workers to organize. Second, whereas these earlier efforts mostly focused on narrow groups of workers, such as full-time white-collar workers at IBM and “perma-temps” at Microsoft, current efforts are much more inclusive, with the Alphabet Workers Union (AWU), for instance, including both full-time and part-time workers at Alphabet. Third, with unions notching real wins across the economy and especially in tech, like Kickstarter United negotiating vastly improved severance terms for laid off workers, it’s clearer and clearer to more tech workers that unions can make a real difference in their lives. They’re not just for industrial workers of bygone eras.

Workers are recognizing this, and so are bosses, as the vicious retaliation against organizers at Google, Apple, and other companies shows. In some ways, the bosses’ desperate attempts to squash organizing are just further proof of how promising these efforts are.

I think it’s safe to say that we’re seeing a resurgence of labor militancy in the US tech sector, which is happening at the same time that tech workers are getting more and more infrastructural power. With so much concentration in the tech, it’s conceivable that a handful of workers at Amazon Web Services, or some groups at Google, could shut down vast swaths of the internet.

At the same time, it’s important to be realistic. Organizing efforts in tech get a lot of attention, and this could be the start of something big, but the bosses still easily have the upper hand, and the path to building real, durable power across the working class is going to take a lot of work.

DIGILABOUR: What do you mean by “recoding” power?

ROTHSTEIN: I called the book “Recoding Power” for two reasons. First, the most striking thing I found in each of the case studies was that what enabled workers to build power was recoding management’s techniques for control into resources for collective action. The short version is that workers can transform management’s justifications for layoffs into arguments for why layoffs are actually avoidable – and doing so is necessary for inspiring the type of widespread collective action through which workers can exercise power. For example, management often presents some kind of economic analysis to argue that the company can’t survive unless they cut jobs. Workers can dissect this analysis and identify its limitations in order to propose alternative business strategies. What was so fascinating to me about this is that workers were basically using management’s own discourse in order to show why mobilizing could be effective, and then organizing to make that possibility a reality.

But I also mean “recoding” power in a second sense, and this is more about debates among theorists and practitioners regarding the nature of power. For reasons I articulated a moment ago, I’m unconvinced by existing approaches to power that seem to conflate it with resources. So one of the things I wanted to do in this book is offer an alternative that’s more consistent with the reality of what we see in the workplace. I think the word “power” is still useful, but we should think about it differently, and, accordingly, organize differently.

DIGILABOUR: What is the role of discourse in this “recoding”? Or: what did you find in terms of discursive creativity?

ROTHSTEIN: Discourse is central to recoding. What I show in the book is that while managers use discourse to control the workplace, workers can transform those discursive techniques of control into resources for collective action. This requires considerable creativity, but it’s by no means beyond workers’ capabilities. Most jobs require at least this amount of creativity, so it’s not much of a surprise that we see workers using the tactic of recoding in many contemporary labor struggles. At Google, for instance, workers announced the formation of AWU in the New York Times with an op-ed in which they charged management with violating the firm’s motto of “don’t be evil,” and positioning themselves as the real keepers of the firm’s values. I call this “discursive opportunism,” and even though opportunism has a bad rep, I think that, given labor’s current position, it’s a worthwhile strategy.

DIGILABOUR: I would like you to talk more about organizational tactics. What are the main organizational challenges, especially democratically?

ROTHSTEIN: The main challenge in organizing is that many of us really struggle to recognize the possibility that we might succeed in getting what we want. Labor and the Left have been losing so badly for so long that it can seem impossible for anything remotely good to happen. You see this in contemporary discussions of what some are calling “techno-feudalism,” as Evgeny Morozov recently observed: in contrast to a few years ago, we may be able to imagine the end of capitalism now, but only if it’s worse than what we had. But the basic point is that we’re so thoroughly disenfranchised in so many areas of our lives, and especially at work, that it’s almost impossible to imagine that we can actually make a difference in our basic living conditions.

Believing that we’re powerless holds us back from doing all the things necessary for organizing. It stops us from making the time to go to a meeting – why would we bother if we can’t do anything anyway? And it stops us from even thinking about how things could be different – because if you can’t make a difference, why even think about it?

The other part of this is that we’re so alienated from each other that it’s difficult to break through this ingrained powerlessness, because usually it takes the external impulse of a relationship to do so, but if you don’t talk to other people, then it’s not going to happen. In many jobs, there aren’t many opportunities to get together with your colleagues and talk about what’s going on and how they’re doing. Social scientists have made careers of writing about the loss of associational life, like how there’s no more bowling leagues in the US or whatever, but there really is something to this, and Covid has no doubt made it more extreme. We’re so busy working all the time – often under time pressure, and afraid of losing our jobs, or being disciplined, and so on – that we don’t have time to just shoot the breeze with people, but it’s those personal connections that really provide the basis for meaningful and effective organizing. The problem is that there’s this sort of catch-22 because the best way to be protected from the kind of pressures that alienate us is to form a union so that your boss has less power over you, but in order to do that, you need to organize, and organizing requires building connections with each other, so we’re back at square one.

You asked about democracy, and I’d say that the main challenge here is that there isn’t any, especially at work. Workers are systematically denied a voice at work, so they don’t feel empowered to speak up when they see a bad decision being made. In most workplaces, there’s no real avenue for exercising voice. Sure, there are lots of offices where management has an “open door policy,” but everyone knows that’s usually BS. Some companies may have real channels for workers to speak up, but without a union, you don’t really have the protection necessary to meaningfully critique management. The reality is that a lot of managers don’t do well with empowered workers wanting to discuss important decisions as equals. You’re in academia, so you know how uniquely tense faculty meetings can be at colleges and universities where professors really do weigh in on governance decisions. All workers should be as protected as tenured professors.

But the other side of this in terms of democracy is that precisely because workers are systematically denied a voice at work, they end up in situations where management makes such poor decisions that they think they have to do layoffs. In doing research for Recoding Power, I spoke to scores of workers who knew that managers were making poor business choices, but there was no way to get their voices heard before things fell apart. At Siemens, for instance, management passed up on Voice-over-IP in the late 1990s, when it was clear to almost everybody (except, apparently, management) that this was the future. But because management made this strategic error, they then found themselves in a position a couple years later where they “had no choice” but to cut jobs.

DIGILABOUR: What’s new in terms of strategic capacity on the part of workers?

ROTHSTEIN: Strategic capacity is a term I build on from Marshall Ganz, who uses it to describe how leaders update their tactics in light of changing circumstances.  The tech sector presents some novel circumstances that require considerable strategic capacity, and in Recoding Power, I focus primarily on the discursive ones. Organizers always need to speak the language of the workers they’re organizing; this doesn’t just mean English, Spanish, or Chinese, this means being able to really communicate in terms of the underlying assumptions that workers have, so that workers believe what organizers say. This is especially important in tech, because the language that tech workers speak can be very different from that of other workers. A lot of this has to do with management’s techniques for control, which have been largely based on fostering a collective identity in the workplace around technical skills and performance targets, but also around shared values.

Organizers need to adapt their discursive repertoires to this new environment. To take a timely and, well, controversial, example, if you watch Lula’s speeches, especially from the 1980s, you can see just how spellbound his audiences are – because he spoke the language of the working class. I think it’s really telling that bourgeois commentators sometimes made fun of him for saying things that were “grammatically incorrect.” Because for the audience he spoke to, there was no mistake, and that’s what made him such an effective leader. So one of the challenges for organizers in tech is to really learn the languages of the workers they’re organizing. As I point out in the book, this is easiest when the workers are the organizers, as, of course, we see with Lula. There’s a real need for organic leadership in tech, and we’re seeing this more and more. I’m really inspired actually by all the amazing folks who came out of the union at Kickstarter (Kickstarter United) and are now organizing across tech.

I’d probably emphasize one other point that’s new, and that is that more and more people are learning the basics of organizing. Some are learning them through all the trainings that the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) hold, whose membership has soared in the last couple years, reaching almost 100,000 in 2021. Labor Notes publishes a really useful pamphlet called “Secrets of a Successful Organizer,” and Jane McAlevey has made it her life’s work to educate people about how to organize, both through workshops and the books she’s written (like No Shortcuts and Raising Expectations, Raising Hell). What’s really cool is that workers are putting these strategies and tactics into practice, so when folks read news coverage about organizing somewhere, they also learn about how to organize. When workers succeeded in organizing a union vote at an Amazon warehouse in New York, for instance, they were really vocal about the tactics they used, describing how they adapted the techniques that McAlevey outlines. We need more leaders with the strategic capacity of the organizers at Amazon Labor Union (ALU).

DIGILABOUR: Based on the lessons learned from the Google case, what are the future challenges in relation to worker solidarity?

ROTHSTEIN: AWU’s efforts have been inspiring and while there are a handful of lessons that we can already draw from this effort, it’s ultimately too soon to tell (like is this strategy of going unaffiliated going to actually work?). The announcement of AWU in January 2021 came on the heels of years of internal organizing at Google, and while the union boasts at least 600 members, there’s still lots of room for growth, both in terms of membership but also strategy and tactics.

There are many lessons we can draw, but off the top of my head, I’d point to four. First, I think we can learn a lot from the workers involved about how to organize across divisions within the working class. AWU includes workers from many different parts of Alphabet, from full-time software developers to part-time workers on temporary contracts. Workers used a variety of tactics to be inclusive, like one-on-one discussions and intensive relationship building, and novel tactics for organizing across different remote locations. I think it’s important to highlight how workers found common ground in part by transforming management’s own discourse into a resource for collective action, so I see Google as illustrating how the tactic of recoding can be used effectively in order to build real working class power.

The second lesson from the Google case is more complicated and has to do with the long, slow process of organizing, rather than just mobilizing. AWU emerged from years of organizing at Google, often around issues that might not appear as labor issues if you think about “labor issues” very narrowly – like, wages were not a central issue. For example: resistance to the “real names” policy that management implemented for Google+, as well as the Walkout in protest of sexual harassment. These and other efforts became the seeds of what eventually morphed into a broader movement for worker power and voice. Some of the other issues that came up along the way had to do with workers refusing to work on contracts from the US Department of Defense that management had accepted. The lesson here is that organizing requires first and foremost listening to workers. Whatever workers care about, that’s a labor issue. Especially in the present circumstances, where labor is so weak, the first step has to be building worker-led organizations in the workplace. Whether those organizations directly address traditional “labor” issues is beside the point. Is the issue widely and deeply felt? Is it winnable and does it build the organization and leaders? Organizers succeed when they ask those questions, rather than trying to organize around issues that other workers in other times in other sectors may have cared about.

The third lesson from Google is that “even” workers at Google need to unionize. You’re probably used to these drool-inducing accounts of what it’s apparently like to work at Google – free sushi, massages, a manicured campus full of colorful communal bikes – but even in a workplace where managers spare no expense to satisfy (some of) the workers, there is still a need for building countervailing power. Management does terrible stuff, sometimes by accident but also sometimes on purpose – like firing people who speak up against taking unethical contracts. Unless there’s someone there to stop them. So, organizing is necessary, even at Google.

The fourth and final lesson is that organizing is possible, “even” at Google. Even where workers are supposed to be paid off by high salaries and relatively generous benefits, and divided from each other by status distinctions and remote work, it’s still possible to organize.

The possibility of worker power at Google further illustrates its necessity, given management’s vicious response. Even at a firm that prides itself on treating (some of) its workers well, and not being “evil,” management still hires union-busting law firms and violates labor law to undermine workers’ organizing efforts. Overall, the lesson from the Google case is that it’s necessary for tech workers to organize – and it’s possible.