Google workers have announced their intention to form a union, under the auspices of @CWAUnion Local 1440. The union is called @AlphabetWorkers (Google maintains the legal and accounting fiction that it is a division of a holding company called "Alphabet").

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Speaking of legal fictions, the union is opening membership to "TVCs" - temps, vendors and contractors - employees who have deliberately misclassified so as to avoid paying them benefits or extending normal workplace protections to them.

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It's a bold move, a countermeasure to thwart the other commercial advantage from worker misclassification: by creating multiple categories of workers, bosses can pit employees against one another, by dangling privileges in front of one group but not the other.

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But it comes at a high price: to gain official legal recognition, more than 50% of eligible workers must join the union. By including more workers, the union is setting a higher bar for official status.

https://t.co/QjVkkM5hXC

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But the union has momentum: a series of high-profile googler uprisings - driven by official tolerance for sexual misconduct, complicity in US military drone programs, secret collaboration with Chinese surveillance and censorship, and more - show how radicalized googlers are.

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Google's management - who cultivated an air of participatory, cuddly collaboration - have arrived at a point where the contradictions between their "values" and the company's profits can no longer be reconciled.

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In Dec 2020, Google fired @timnitGebru, an eminent Black AI scientist who refused to retract a paper critical of its profitable Big Data research. Management compounded their sins by making false claims about Gebru's dismissal.

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The unionization drive is under the CWA's #CODE (Coalition to Organize Digital Employees) project. Though CODE is no stranger to conflict, Google represents a serious challenge, thanks to its partnership with notorious union-busters @IRIConsultants.

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(IWI's tactics pale in comparison to the mercenaries that @Amazon has hired to bust its unions: the @pinkerton company, who have spilled rivers of workers' blood in their murderous history):

https://t.co/XE1gb7GTbk

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For important context on the drive, check out @tech_actions' article on the announcement, which explains why googlers have formed a "non-contract union" that does not yet have official recognition.

https://t.co/3qrQEXeMit

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"Non-contract unions embody the idea that worker power does not come from legal processes, but rather through building power through solidarity."

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More from Cory Doctorow #BLM

Happy Birthday to the queen of the scream queens, Barbara Steele! https://t.co/qnhQvROGVa


Happy Birthday to the queen of the scream queens, Barbara Steele!
https://t.co/qnhQvROGVa


Happy Birthday to the queen of the scream queens, Barbara Steele! https://t.co/qnhQvROGVa


Happy Birthday to the queen of the scream queens, Barbara Steele! https://t.co/qnhQvROGVa


Happy Birthday to the queen of the scream queens, Barbara Steele! https://t.co/qnhQvROGVa
I've just read one of the most lucid, wide-ranging, cross-disciplinary critiques of cryptocurrency and blockchain I've yet to encounter. 1/


It comes from David "DSHR" Rosenthal, a distinguished technologist whose past achievements including helping to develop X11 and the core technologies for Nvidia.

https://t.co/tkAMShno4k 2/

Rosenthal's critique is a transcript of a lecture he gave to Stanford's EE380 class, adapted from a December 2021 talk for an investor conference. 3/

It is a bang-up-to-date synthesis of many of the critical writings on the subject, glued together with Rosenthal's own deep technical expertise. He calls it "Can We Mitigate Cryptocurrencies' Externalities?"

The presence of "externalities" in Rosenthal's title is key. 4/

Rosenthal identifies blockchainism's core ideology as emerging from "the libertarian culture of Silicon Valley and the cypherpunks," and states that "libertarianism's attraction is based on ignoring externalities."

This is an important critique of libertarianism. 5/
Today's Twitter threads (a Twitter thread).

Inside: Criti-Hype; Right to Repair is back for 2021; The free market and rent-seeking; and more!

Archived at: https://t.co/pXnzoWKJn2

#Pluralistic

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Criti-Hype: Tech bros will settle for "evil genius."

https://t.co/OyiM1vUS8Y

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Right to Repair is back for 2021: Will Apple sabotage this one too?

https://t.co/3gcyEZQWfk

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The free market and rent-seeking: Unauthorized bread and poor doors.

https://t.co/7Ob6AdmkDz

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#10yrsago Diane Duane’s crowdfunded publishing experiment finally concludes https://t.co/qsRnZxiL8b

#10yrsago Inside Sukey, the anti-kettling mobile app https://t.co/puGNKw5XgF

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