On Remote Work

Solidarity now, solidarity forever

This past summer, I interned remotely for a large tech company. I spent all of my days at home and interacted solely with members of my small team, with the few exceptions of the other interns and other engineers who were working on similar projects. In 3 months, I met only two subcontracted employees, both of whom were engineers. I never got the chance to interact with, much less get to know, any of the janitorial staff, the food workers, the security guards who I would’ve gotten to meet if I had been in the office. I got to benefit from the perks of remote work: no commute, increased flexibility and more personal time. But I also began to realize that conversations about remote work were excluding entire categories of tech workers that happen to already be the most vulnerable: blue-collar workers.

COVID has meant that this experience is taking place throughout the tech industry. Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft, Shopify and Square are just a few of the companies that will allow many or all of their employees to work remotely even after the pandemic is over, but these opportunities are not offered equally to everyone. Blue-collar workers, who on average earn much less than full-time employees (FTEs), are much less likely to be able to work from home. These are the same workers that have already begun to organize; security guards at Facebook and Google unionized in 2018, cafeteria workers at Google unionized in 2019, and shuttle drivers at Apple unionized all the way back in 2016. Discourse about remote work is thus predisposed to exclude the workers who have historically led organizing within the tech industry. 

Remote work presents us with a crossroads, where one path leads towards a grim future of a permanent tech underbelly where distinctions between blue and white-collar workers are exacerbated; blue-collar workers struggle to find work while white-collar workers are happy with their newfound freedom and thus content to let organizing efforts wither and die. The other path, however, leads to a future where FTEs realize that their employers may not in reality have their best interests at heart, collaborate with their fellow employees regardless of class, and create a new swell of tech organizing. The relationship between employee and employer is likely to change for all workers; without solidarity, we run the risk of going down the dark first path, rather than the optimistic second.

The Great Divide

In his article “The Making of the Tech Worker Movement”, Ben Tarnoff outlines how we can sort tech workers into three categories:

The first is subcontracted service workers: those who perform service labor for a tech company without being directly employed by that company… The second category is subcontracted office workers. They have the same employment status as the janitors but they sit at a desk and move symbols around on a screen… [the third are] full-time office workers who are directly employed by a tech company.

These distinctions often cause full-time employees to believe that they are fundamentally different from contractors, even those who work at their own company. Facebook engineers in Menlo Park believe that they have more in common with Microsoft engineers in Redmond than they do with the janitors who mop the floors at Facebook HQ. It’s only recently that the lines between these three categories have begun to dissolve. The recent Alphabet Worker’s Union includes not just full-time employees but subcontractors as well, and full-time workers at Facebook mobilized to help food service workers organize in 2017.

Remote work has the potential to undo much of this progress and transform Tarnoff’s three categories of workers into two: those who can and do work from home, and those who cannot. It’s not guaranteed that this split will divide evenly between subcontractors and FTEs, since tech companies are increasing contracting jobs that previously would’ve been full-time positions. However, what is certain is that the blue-collar jobs that are often at the bottom of the tech worker hierarchy aren’t suited to working from home – that is, if they’re not deemed unnecessary and eliminated altogether. 

The effects of the undoing of the connections forged between FTEs, technical subcontractors and blue-collar workers cannot be overstated in terms of ongoing efforts to organize tech workplaces. Subcontractors, particularly service workers, were the first groups in tech to organize, and their efforts have been vital in helping energize full-time employees to organize around labor. As one Facebook employee that Tarnoff interviewed noted, 

I read [venture capitalist] Paul Graham and other Silicon Valley thinkers that rail against unions. The cafeteria worker campaign opened my eyes and made me realize that a union is just a group of workers making demands together. Organizing wasn’t some abstract thing I read about in the news anymore. Instead, I talked to workers about what better wages and benefits would mean to them and their families, and there was no way I could not want that for them.

Additionally, solidarity between the three groups is vital in dismantling the boundaries that tech companies have drawn between them. Cooperation across class lines has arguably been the most important factor in dissolving this distinction and getting FTEs to view themselves as workers, an essential step in larger efforts to organize white-collar tech employees. Further splitting the divide, not merely on the basis of employment status but also on the physical location of work would make it astronomically more difficult to form these bonds and create a sense of worker-consciousness. This has the potential seriously set back the tech labor movement and destroy much of the hard-earned progress of the years leading up to the pandemic.

A Shift in Attitudes

If remote work is disrupting class collaboration, how should we reconcile that with the fact that remote work has seen an increase in labor organizing amongst white collar tech workers? After all, the pandemic has brought with the creation of the Alphabet Workers Union, consisting of both FTEs and contractors, as well as the formation of the white-collar union at Glitch, the second of it’s kind in the tech industry. The success among white-collar tech organizing during the pandemic further highlights the split that is occurring between blue and while-collar workers. While janitors and cafeteria employees face unprecedented precarity regarding the continued existence of their jobs, full-time employees are finding more success than ever in unionizing. In this way, remote work is especially bittersweet. It simultaneously threatens the livelihood of those most often neglected by tech while offering the chance to re-imagine the relationship between white-collar tech employees and their employers in a fundamentally different way than how it was originally conceived. 

The relationship between full-time employee and employer in Silicon Valley was actively cultivated from the Valley’s inception to be different from the rest of the country. Much of this was due to efforts on behalf of early Silicon Valley executives to prevent unionization at their companies. Intel co-founder Robert Noyce referred to unions as “a death threat to Intel and the semiconductor industry in general”. Back in 1983, an AP article about the lack of unionization in tech attributes it partially to “a sense that the valley is special and its people a breed apart”. In the early days of the tech industry, this relationship was created through a combination of above-market wages, health care packages and, particularly unique to tech, giving employees stock options. Today these benefits are added to by the often absurd perks that tech companies give out: candy shops and a dry cleaners at Facebook, free shipping of breast milk at Zillow, or allowing employees to borrow a car at Tesla. These perks create a corporatized kinship between employee and employer that is wholly unique. They also help stifle any feelings of discontent or yearnings to organize.

Remote work means that many of these perks are no longer possible; full-time employees are no longer going into a fancy campus with a climbing wall and free froyo. Just like the sunglasses in They Live, remote work could be the development that allows FTEs to see through the artificially crafted narrative of their employer and understand what is common knowledge outside of the tech industry: that employees and employers have often diametrically opposed interests. 

Again, though, it’s worth emphasizing that this reconsidering is something that can only really happen amongst FTEs. Not only are contractors excluded from taking advantage of remote work in this way, but they’re already all-too aware of how the interests of their employers oppose their own. Companies often feel that they can get away with mistreating their contractors in a way that they could never do with their FTEs. Think of the unholy working conditions of a Facebook content moderator, or the difference in how AirBnb cut contracts short and how they laid off full-time employees. When we get excited about the potential for remote work to help with white-collar organizing, it’s imperative that we don’t forget that the many tech workers don’t get to benefit from this.

It’s also not a guarantee that this shift in behavior might occur amongst FTEs. This has the potential to backfire in a substantial way. When a full-time tech employee no longer feels a warm fuzzy feeling towards their employer, they could simply choose to disengage and stand on the sideline. But it also could lead to more organizing than ever, as an increasing number of FTEs are no longer incentivized to overlook the oft-pernicious behavior of their employer. Remote work has the opportunity to swell the base of workers open to unionization by vast amounts, and that’s something that those of us who care about labor within the tech industry must take advantage of. 

An Undetermined Future

Right now, as the desire to return to normalcy reaches a fever pitch, it’s vital that we don’t fall into the ever-so-common techno-determinism trap and believe that everything will work itself out. What’s so scary, but also so exciting, is that we all have the ability to impact which of these futures becomes real. All of us who care about organizing the tech industry have the ability to play a role; whether it’s supporting causes like the Bessemer Alabama drive by phone banking, talking to employees at your own company about unionization, or simply striking up friendships with employees that you might have previously dismissed, we now have the opportunity to further connections with communities that are important to us, rather than withdrawing from them. The freedom remote work offers is not one that allows us to post pictures of us working in a tropical paradise, but one that allows us to free ourselves from the golden handcuffs of the tech industry, and gain more control of our shared future as workers.