Union Power Is Putting Pressure on Silicon Valley's Tech Giants (bloomberg.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Organized labor doesn't rack up a lot of wins these days, and Silicon Valley isn't most people's idea of a union hotbed. Nonetheless, in the past three years unions have organized 5,000 people who work on Valley campuses. Among others, they've unionized shuttle drivers at Apple, Tesla, Twitter, LinkedIn, EBay, Salesforce.com, Yahoo!, Cisco, and Facebook; security guards at Adobe, IBM, Cisco, and Facebook; and cafeteria workers at Cisco, Intel, and, earlier this summer, Facebook. The workers aren't technically employed by any of those companies. Like many businesses, Valley giants hire contractors that typically offer much less in the way of pay and benefits than the tech companies' direct employees get. Among other things, such arrangements help companies distance themselves from the way their cafeteria workers and security guards are treated, because somebody else is cutting the checks. Silicon Valley Rising, a coalition of unions and civil rights, community, and clergy groups heading the organizing campaign, says its successes have come largely from puncturing that veneer of plausible deniability. That means directing political pressure, media scrutiny, and protests toward the tech companies themselves. "Everybody knows that the contractors will do what the tech companies say, so we're focused on the big guys," says Ben Field, a co-founder of the coalition who heads the AFL-CIO's South Bay Labor Council. Labor leaders say their efforts have gotten some tech companies to cut ties with an anti-union contractor, intervene with others to ease unionization drives, and subsidize better pay for contract workers. "If you want to get people to buy your product, you don't want them to feel that buying your product is contributing to the evils of the world," says Silicon Valley Rising co-founder Derecka Mehrens, who directs Working Partnerships USA, a California nonprofit that advocates for workers. Tech companies have been image-conscious and closely watched of late, she says, and the coalition is "being opportunistic."

Comments

Left Wing

[Iamthecheese]

San Francisco loves its left wingers, but somehow the economic side of that is left in the dust. It almost seems like they're authoritarian corporatists wielding identity politics as a pathetic fig leaf.

Re:Left Wing

[sabri]

California in general, and SF in particular, have very pro-union laws snd policies,

The unions where also very powerful in Detroit. That did not work out too well ultimately now, did it?

As with everything, there has to be a balance. I don't like powerful unions. I don't like unions that have obtained the right to grab money from my paycheck as they wish. I don't like unions dictating how a business should be run.

I also don't like businesses like early Ford, peeping into people's windows to see if they adhere to Ford's personal morals. Or businesses that abuse workers like the truck companies that force their employees into leasing trucks. That's when unions are needed, to correct the imbalance.

Unions and corporations are always playing a game of rope-pulling, and it is in everyones interest to maintain a healthy balance. You give some, you lose some. If one of either sides is able to "defeat" the opponent, everybody loses.