In recent years, organized labor has been experiencing a huge resurgence in advanced capitalist Western countries.
From coffee shops to newsrooms and beyond, it's all buzzing with union initiatives and collective action. And now there is a lot of talk about it even in the US technology sector, the one that seemed least at "risk": an epochal change.
That things were changing was in the air. Too many awarenesses have arisen since the pandemic: what happened within every worker's "animus" was also reproduced on a larger scale.
A small revolution
The data compiled by Collective Action in Tech, which are further quantified in the chart below from Statista, show that the major Big Tech companies have been “pushed” quite a bit from 2019 to today. Class actions already increased more that year than the previous four years combined.
And we are not only talking about new unions, but also about collective action in general: threatening or implementing them, protests, petitions or votes to better organize dissent. Of the 481 shares registered at the time of writing, 352 are in the past three years.
This general wave of "new workers' recovery" strikes me a lot. Last year there were protests in the USA against Google (epochal: it was there that I realized that things were changing a lot). In the UK against the Deliveroo delivery platform. In Germany against the Gorillas, in South Africa collective action against Uber.
And in 2022?
The first months of the year already show what the next trend will be. Starting in January, five large class actions against Activision Blizzard, Facebook, Google Fiber. And the last, the most striking: the April 3 vote with which Amazon workers on Staten Island voted to set up a union. It is the first time in the USA. Another similar vote, for another Amazon hub, is expected on April 25.
