Solidarity Tech
Context
Use in political campaigns, such as that of Mamdani in NYC, by Micah Sifry:
"One of the less-heralded stories of Mamdani’s rise is how his campaign used technology originally built to help organize rideshare workers – a notably difficult-to-organize constituency – to power his anti-establishment campaign. But figuring out how to reel in thousands of disparate individuals and then turn them into a persuasion-and-mobilization machine is a problem that wildfire grassroots campaigns have always struggled with. So while we don’t have the whole story yet, here’s a bit more to help understand the emerging picture.
Monday, I had a chance to chat with Ivan Pardo, the 38-year-old founder and sole proprietor of Solidarity Tech, whose platform serves as the main technology backbone for Mamdani’s mayoral campaign. As you’ll learn from our conversation, Solidarity Tech is only now starting to be used by electoral campaigns. And it’s cheap – even with a recent price hike it’s a bargain compared to most campaign tools. Pardo was a union organizer with a tech background when he started building tools to support an effort he was part of in Los Angeles to organize rideshare drivers. After some initial success there, other unions started adopting his tool. The Workers Lab put in a $150,000 to assist with its development. And then the Mamdani campaign came knocking. Solidarity Tech was also the tech engine behind the recent victory of Catherine Connolly in her bid to become Ireland’s President, and it’s being used by Avi Lewis in his bid to lead Canada’s New Democratic Party. For all that, Pardo tells me it’s still a very small company—just him, an engineer and a designer."
(https://theconnector.substack.com/p/solidarity-tech-the-platform-powering)
Description
Ivan Pardo:
"Solidarity Tech came out of my work eight years ago co-founding Rideshare Drivers United Los Angeles. I didn’t set out to build a constituent relationship management (CRM) system. I set out to build a rideshare worker union. I started going to the airport parking lot, talking with workers, and ran into a tech problem that the off-the-shelf tech wasn’t really addressing. It was costing us something like 10 cents a text when I knew that Twilio charged less than a penny. So I built a little tool to send texts at cost. And then I went back to doing organizing work as a volunteer. A few months later, I built another little tool so we could survey and ranked-choice poll our contact list and link that information to the person we were texting. Fast forward a few years, we started winning and passed a law called AB 5 that gave drivers the rights of employees. And at that point, some unions started reaching out to see if they could use what we were using. So I started thinking about turning it into a product, which we launched last year, March 2024.
Considering the origins of the product, Solidarity Tech is really good for doing deep organizing at scale. There are 600,000 ride share workers in the state of California and we started off with no staff, just volunteers, and then a bunch of other volunteer driver/organizers who we found along the way. We needed a way to put tools into the hands of workers to allow them to build their own unions -- not letting people fall through the cracks, and allowing the relationships that we’re building with people to be stronger than what you could traditionally do over email. Ideally text and phone act as a bridge to an in-person relationship, and then you develop people’s commitment through in-person meetings."
(https://theconnector.substack.com/p/solidarity-tech-the-platform-powering)