Re: [Marxism] Should IT workers unionize?

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Joonas Laine wrote:
> Anyone read any good books on the "high tech revolution", and what it
> really means? Is it a paradigmatic shift in capitalism, or more or less
> the same shit in a different package? The autonomists' material is heavy
> on impressionistic philosophizing, but very lean on any numbers.
> *Politically* though I think it's worth responding to, all the more so
> because they do make very good critical points e.g. on the social
> democratic left's orientation towards the "wellfare state".

As somebody who has made a living as a programmer since 1968, I have 
only seen one attempt at starting a union. Back in 1972 I was working 
for a department store in Boston that had a small DP staff, less than a 
dozen. A new boss was rubbing everybody the wrong way and one of my 
co-workers asked me if I had any interest in helping to get us into a 
union. Her father was a long time official for the electrical workers 
union, can't remember if it was the leftist UE or not.

The big problem facing programmers is the same one facing adjunct 
professors. There are deep individualistic tendencies that tend to make 
each programmer look to their own devices. There was a very good article 
in the Nation a while back that is worth referring to again:

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080623/sirota

Certainly the conditions seem ripe. Between 2000 and 2004, 221,000 US 
tech jobs were eliminated as offshore outsourcing accelerated. In 2005 
the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers reported the first 
drop in median income for tech workers in the thirty-one years it had 
been producing annual wage and salary analyses. And WashTech's survey of 
IT workers found that the majority said their healthcare premiums had 
increased and their wages had either remained flat or dropped. As these 
trends have intensified, WashTech's membership has grown. Nonetheless, 
there are reasons that only 2 to 5.5 percent of high-tech workers are 
unionized--reasons that have little to do with concrete economic factors.

"Many people in these industries say, 'I hate unions' just on 
principle," Courtney tells me as we walk out of Starbucks. "But these 
same people will then go to the Mini-Microsoft website and voice their 
complaints because they know the company is reading the site." This 
constituency is a key component of today's white-collar uprising. They 
are swing voters, but they aren't the socially liberal, economically 
conservative suburbanites pundits always say are the key swing 
demographic in presidential elections. They are folks whose 
libertarianism has led them to vote Republican and dislike unions but 
whose economic self-interest is now pulling them in a populist direction.

(clip)

________________________________________________
YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
Send list submissions to: Marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Set your options at: 
http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40archives.econ.utah.edu