Every place has its different environment, whether it be the level of organisation, reputation of socialism, dominant values of society, history and experiences, conflicts and crises. Because of these dynamics, I’d expect to see stark differences in what the movement looks like around the world. An obvious example familiar to most here is seeing the widespread and militant union mobilisations in France’s retirement age protests.
Which countries do you have experience in, and how are their labour movements different?
The title is intentionally vague by saying ‘labour movement’, so you’re welcome to talk about workplace attitudes, unions, socialist organisations, legislation and more.
I’m a union organizer in tech. I’m Italian, but I live in Germany and I do interact a lot with American organizers.
In Germany, most organizing is effectively cleansed of political identity and needs to be conducted in a very sanitized environment to be appealing to workers. It’s also very very focused on the legal aspects.
Americans are way more technical about the whole of it: more methodologies, more processes, more tools, it’s a game of numbers.
Italians…, well, let’s say the unions there deserve the hate. Not because they are particularly corrupted or conservative (which they are), but because they have no fucking clue what they are doing. They are much slower than their foreign counterparts, they have no resources, they have very little coordination and no interest in getting better. Like many things in Italy, they are slowly sinking in the quicksand. The organizers on the ground they are often under prepared and they have no concept of methodology: they know their legal stuff, but they believe that building momentum in the workplace is just a matter of identifying the right arguments and deliver the right speech at the worker assemblies. Basically they rely on luck, workers motivation and 50 years old processes. They also have no operational coordination on a regional or national level. People from the same union working on the same category don’t know or talk to each other unless they work in the same physical office.
I’m an American software engineer who has badly wanted my field to unionize. Do you think it will ever happen? I’m not hopeful because there are too many people who are just in the field for the lucrative salaries and have no real interest or passion. They’ll put up with anything if it means a six figure+ salary:
Scrummicromanagement, open office spaces, incredibly unrealistic deadlines that were set without engineer input, vacation time hardly ever getting approved, etc.What do you mean? The USA has a lot of momentum and a lot of tech companies are unionizing, many more than anywhere else. It’s on mainstream newspapers every other day
I don’t mean tech companies, or the broad designation of “tech workers”, I’m specifically talking about software developers (and maybe QA). For example, a salesperson is not going to understand why engineers hate open office spaces and how it makes it extremely difficult for us to focus on our work.
Union organizing should be done across departments. Anyway software developers are doing a lot of organizing and unionizing, exactly because they have more secure positions. AWU, Kickstarter, NYT, Grindr, and many others are almost entirely office workers, many of which are software developers. Software developers are tech workers: drawing lines doesn’t help anybody and historically has always been to the detriment of the workers movement. Software developers start organizing when they stop being software developers and become tech workers.
Also FYI: I’ve been a software developer for a decade and I mostly organize software developers that, if anything, are overrepresented in “tech workers” spaces, to the point where we have to put rules like “don’t talk about git, it scares the workers” to prevent the spaces to become cliquey.
Thanks for the perspective. I’m US born and raised, educated in public schools, so the only education I got about unions was the bad stuff. The only unions I know of in my area are electricians and plumbers, so I assumed it was a vocation-specific thing. Also lol @ your last sentence, I can totally imagine
Join Tech Workers Coalition then. https://techworkerscoalition.org/
‘More equal then the rest’ eh?
Good luck with that, truly an american attitude
Not even remotely what I said. I was referring to how different positions deal with different issues and it seemed strange to me to lump them together just because they fall under the broad designation of “tech worker”. But, someone already corrected my ignorance in a way that was much more constructive and helpful than “FUCKIN AMERICANS AMIRITE GUIS???”
