It’s happening. The shuttle drivers at Loop Transportation, the shuttle bus company used by Facebook, have voted to unionize under the auspices of the Teamsters (historically appropriate, actually) and will now bargain collectively. This is being trumpeted as a watershed moment in Silicon Valley – although most people seem to be regarding it as the invasion of old-school backward-thinking legacy business infecting the land of disruption and innovation.
Horseshit.
The union is the natural response to what is blithely called “the 1099 economy.” When everyone below director level is a contractor – especially a completely independent contractor – companies are free from the burden of treating their employees like, well, employees. You can just “sever your relationship” if you want to get rid of them. Benefits and health care are their own business, not yours. The technology industry has managed to create a world where the smartphone-enabled equivalent of picking up guys from the Home Depot parking lot is a preferred business model for the likes of Handy or Taskrabbit or half a dozen “transportation network companies”.
This is exactly what unions formed to prevent. You can’t just randomly donk off employees for the sake of saving money, or because you don’t want to be responsible for their actions, or say ‘this is the job and you have six hours of unpaid downtime in between, take it or leave it.” The role of the union is to shift the balance of power so the regular workers have a say. And in that mythical 1950s Pleasantville that the Republicans constantly talk about wanting us to return to? Unions represented one out of three American workers.
It’s going to be a useful reality check. Nothing like a picket line and a giant inflatable rat to make people realize that oops, there are human beings on the other side of the screen, and they’re more than just the $40,000-a-year Morlocks that turn the gears so your cloud-cuckoo-land can carry on. These are the real human beings in Northern California who were here long before you dropped out of Stanford and they count just as much, because your Ayn Rand paradise here in Galt’s Gulch on Market will go to shit once there’s nobody actually driving the shuttles or catering the burrito bar or cleaning up the gym or restocking the snack harbor.
And for me, it’s a little bit of the East Coast to cheer me up. The people’s flag is deepest red, motherfuckers. (Not Cardinal red. Fuck those guys.)