Minority PMC Unions
Description
Dom King:
“The “militant white-collar tech worker” is ready to fight. Radicalized by the election of Donald Trump, Silicon Valley workers are eager to shed the traditional apolitical orientation of “creatives” and pursue collective action. The recent announcement of the Alphabet Workers Union, formed in the belly of the company that serves as the most ready referent of the term “Big Tech,” has particularly captured the media imagination.
A recent New York Times article tackles what many consider the primary objection to these unions: that white-collar workers are “too privileged” to organize. The article rightly dismisses this concern: at a for-profit company, every wage worker is in an essentially antagonistic relationship with their employer, no matter how much they make. Nurses and longshoremen regularly make six-figure salaries, but it would be absurd to exclude NNU and ILWU members from the “working class.”
No, the real problem with the Alphabet Workers Union is that it’s not a union. It’s rather a “minority union”—essentially an employee pressure group, formed through the Communication Workers of America (CWA). The traditional organizing process through the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) requires majority approval, a long, fraught, and fragile process, but one that results in actual bargaining power with management. A minority union, by contrast, can be formed by a very “small activist base”. According to the Wall Street Journal, the “Alphabet Workers Union is composed of fewer than 800 workers among Alphabet’s roughly 250,000 employees and contractors, some of whom are technically employed by completely separate entities, some of which are already unionized.” And their formation as a “union” does not give them any negotiation power, though they do pay dues to CWA.
There is certainly something to be said for minority unionism. In states with very regressive labor laws and political climates, going through the NLRB recognition process is practically impossible. And long before the Wagner Act, minority unionism was in practice just unionism itself: you start with a small group, you grow it, and you force the employer to recognize you through your numbers and militancy. In many ways, the political economic situation of the present bears great similarity to that of the 30s; maybe our organizing tactics should meet that situation.
But there is a danger here that minority unionism today will simply be “union” minoritarianism. Rather than the carefully identified leaders so crucial to building majority support, a mere handful of activists is sufficient to form a minority union. This is not William Z. Foster’s “militant minority,” working within already existing mass organizations to radicalize them, but rather a grouplet of self-identified workplace “radicals” for whom winning majorities is not even an explicit goal, let alone a necessary precondition for the exertion of real power.
The demands described in the Times article certainly seem quite different from the traditional bread-and-butter workplace demands. Tech workers gravitate toward things like banning Trump from their platforms and gender and racial equity within their companies, two demands to which many Silicon Valley executives are probably quite sympathetic—unlike, of course, higher wages, the imposition of “just cause” for discharge, a binding workplace grievance procedure, contractually mandated shop-floor rights, and ultimately more democratic control over the workplace. In the case of demands for informal and extralegal tech censorship over ideologues like Trump, insofar they result in the narrowing of the space for the exercise of civic liberties as a whole, one might even deem this expression of workplace “antagonism” a kind of class collaboration.”
(https://damagemag.com/2021/02/10/the-pmc-gets-organized/)
Discussion
PMC Unions as Class Collaboration
Dom King:
“ There is something dangerous about the PMC union, given the importance of media apparatuses in our attention economy. The Teamsters represent 1.4 million almost exclusively blue-collar workers in trucking, warehousing, and manufacturing. They have 68k Twitter followers. The New Yorker union, which represents 100 some workers, has 11k followers. Given the PMC control over the media, whose labor disputes are going to get the sympathetic press, which demands will appear in headlines? Recently the day-long walkout of fact checkers at the New Yorker and the Teamsters strike at Hunts Point Market both got one article in The New York Times. The terrifying truth is that these PMC pressure groups could be presented as the union archetype in the near future, while traditional unions become a weird anachronism. Rather than representing a turning of the tide, the PMC union could function as a cruel accelerator of labor’s decline. Of course, minority unions don’t have to be this way, but their natural composition—aspiring managers + activist-y types—inclines them toward PMC LARPing. If they are really used as organizing vehicles, rather than means of making minoritarian and particularist demands on management, they could be fruitful paths forward at a nadir of labor’s power in America. But that would require, as with much worth saving in the present, getting the PMC to overcome the confused and oftentimes class collaborationist orientation that issues from their structural position.”