Archiving tech Worker unionism

For the final project I want to create a database of tech unions in the US.

The tech worker movement is something that I was a part of and something that I continue to study and contribute to in my own research. For several years now, I—and a small team of tech workers, former tech workers, and researchers—have been archiving collective action in the tech industry. I started to do this because tech worker actions typically relied on non conventional methods such as digital work stoppages, online petitions, wage transparency initiatives, and walkouts, which meant that this vast movement happening in the tech industry wasn’t being captured by traditional institutions like the Bureau of Labor Statistics. We also wanted to build a tool that was useful for tech organizers and a way to share learnings across the industry.

As I worked to capture this data, what I found was that this dataset, over time, was able to represent the arc of the tech labor movement. This graph represents the number of collective actions in the tech industry over the past few years, and what you can see is that starting in 2018, there was a massive surge in collective actions by tech workers. 

However, as we approach 2020, the number of collective actions in the industry starts to taper off. And so one question I began to ask was: is tech worker organizing dying down? From talking to my network of organizers in the industry, I knew this wasn’t the case. Instead, what was happening was that organizing in the industry was taking a more focused and militant approach—a shift to organizing unions.

This is part of the reason I wanted to work on this project. In order to capture this next phase of the tech worker movement, archiving collective actions alone is now no longer enough. To complete the picture, we also need to document the new union movement.

So one question you may have is what does any of this have to do with the themes of Ancient Future Technology?

For me, this comes back to one of my favorite ancient future technologies—the archive. When we think of archives, we might typically think of extremely low-tech things like filing cabinets or book archives. In fact, almost every ancient civilization had archives of some type. And so what I think is awesome about this application of the archive is that it's all about using this ancient technology to hold our modern day tech industry accountable.   

There are a few other contemporary archival projects that I draw inspiration from. One of my favorite examples is the anti-eviction mapping project, which is a project that archived and mapped evictions during the crisis of the pandemic. Another one is the strike make by the China Labor Bulletin that maps wildcat strikes happening across China. 

In this day and age where we are encouraged to “move fast and break things,” to innovate forwards and forget the path we came from, I think that these kinds of archives have incredible power in helping us remember our history of struggles. 

The design behind this particular archive is inspired by various themes from the class such as discussions we've had about the role of shared ownership, the question of who has agency in this new age of AI, the thinking we've been doing around networked knowledge, and also the power of the story of self. 

So, when I built out this archive, I wanted to keep the following ideas in mind:

• The first thing was making sure that the data behind this archive wasn’t locked away such that only I could edit them. This is why I wanted to create the archive in a way that was open to the tech worker community for updating. To do this, I've built the archive using Air Table as the backend database so that changes can easily be made to the data, and more importantly, so that the data remains editable and owned by the broader tech worker community. 

• Drawing inspiration from the intelligence found in a network of mycelium, the second point was to incorporate network thinking into the data collection process. While the goal of the archive is to provide an easy portal for making this data available to tech organizers, it's important to remember that knowledge/data can sometimes operate in more interesting and useful ways when it is networked. This is why the process of data collection is such an important part of this project. That’s why I see the data collection process as an opportunity to begin to build a network of union organizers where each of us can share and exchange lessons with each other. 

• Finally, the last design decision I wanted to call out was incorporating a story of self for each union—or incorporating a union’s story of us. Just like how we all shared a story of self, I want to include a union’s story of us into each entry so that people visiting this archive can receive this powerful introduction to the union, and perhaps feel inspired enough to take this energy back to their own workplaces. Since it will obviously make the most sense for union organizers to tell the story of their union, I’ll leverage the network of organizers that I built out in the previous point.