This is what happens when you put a guy that fixed bread prices in charge of transportation.
Google spent enough on stock buybacks in the last year to pay the median wage of the 12,000 engineers they laid off for 23 years
:yea:
You’d think this would be a brilliant eye opener to techbros that even software devs need a union, but then you read the responses to the tweet.
engineers in america, of whatever type, seem completely inoculated against union agitation. STEMlords have such powerful brainworms.
The top post on the Orange Site right now features a bunch of STEMlord commentators backslapping each other about how cool it is that some C-suite dude from coinbase is getting a $100 million golden parachute. They’re getting their throats slit and bragging about how now they’ll have a second smile.
Not all of them, but a lot.
And most of those open to the idea don’t think of themselves as exploited. They want a union so that they can stand in solidarity with others, not to bargain better conditions for themselves.
I think it is as simple as that: they don’t see themselves as exploited. They think they got a good situation economically and as a (sub)class. Hence why their sympathies, and often condescension, are directed at the lower (sub)classes, particularly manual laborers.
On the current trajectory, this will change. Wages will fall, hours will increase, people will get fired and fear for their jobs. This is actually a fairly interesting space to organize in, as you can get a visceral sense of the power of both material conditions vs. lefty organizing as a conscious project.
The cynical part of me thinks that this will only even be imaginable once tech properly implodes. I firmly believe that day is coming as the free money dries up, but even then Silicon Valley ideology is so ingrained that I can’t really see it happening, in the Bay Area at least. The mixture of feeling invincible and “fuck you got mine” is a helluva drug.
AI is going to absolutely decimate tech, and quickly, too. This is just the beginning of the mass layoffs, in fact I’d wager that the whole looming recession has been contrived to give big tech companies cover to eliminate positions that will be replaced by AI.
Damn if only the railroad unions had literally any leverage. Oh well, thanks congress!
Well a few include 1)raise the stock price, since fewer stocks are out there, 2)also lower the chance of a hostile takeover, amongst a few
:wtyp:
