Once you’ve read the welcome thread and community guidelines, please drop in to introduce yourself in this thread, and say “hello” to your peers.
I’ll start –
Hi! I’m Drew DeVault and I’m one of the admins on this forum. I’m responsible for the sysadmin tasks and I also work on moderation here.
I live in the Netherlands, where I own a small company called SourceHut, and I was born and raised in the United States. It’s just me and my colleague at the moment, so there’s not much need to organize ourselves internally, but we try to run things equitably, fairly, and transparently, both for ourselves and our users, who we invite to get involved in the decision making. In the future I’d like to transition to a co-op or even explore radical structures like user ownership over the platform – at least once the cost and overhead of doing this for a two-employee company is easier to justify against our other priorities.
Besides that, I also often blog about politics, including labor in tech, at drewdevault.com. Check it out?
I’m happy to see you here Let’s get organized and do something about this mess we’re in.
I’m Simone, I’ve been part of Tech Workers Coalition for 8 years now (first in Beriln, then Italy, now in the Global section). Formerly a python/scala dev, now I do organizational consultancy for associations, co-ops, sometimes political collectives and in general democratic workplaces.
I still do technical stuff with Reversing.works, a group that performs digital investigations, mostly on platform workers apps, to identify privacy or labor violations and empower unions and workers with this knowledge against the platform.
oh boy, there’s plenty I think and they keep coming lol.
Stuff that applies to pretty much any organizing context:
ideas and arguments don’t change mind. Not even self-interest does. Relations change minds and building social infrastructure is more important than having a good analysis or good communication.
attention is the scarcest resource these days, so anything you do should be more interesting, fulfilling and fun than watching netflix, or your effort is doomed to fail.
practice always comes first. The knowledge you develop from going through something is much better than the one that derives from analysis and studying. Doing things is more important than knowing things.
This might sound very specific, but it’s an insight I realized only recently and it’s very specific to tech workers:
when engaging with politics or union organizing, tech workers do not care much about autonomy compared to other people: they care a lot more about meaning and impact. This, in my mind, is because they often have a degree of autonomy in the workplace, they are expected to have agency under agile methodologies, they are expected to take responsibilities. So if their political space asks them to do the same, they might react negatively compared to, let’s say, a factory worker or a cashier. For some, autonomy is liberating and empowering, for tech workers feels too much like their daily exploitation. Coming to them with clear tasks, stuff to execute, a strong narrative of why this is important, is much more effective than in other contexts where this could be seen as patronizing, too hierarchical, or dogmatic.
Those are really great insights actually, thank you for sharing!
“Practice comes first” reminds me of the concept of revolutionary prefiguration, which is a practice of acting in a manner consistent with the world you want to achieve today. In tech-friendly terms I’d also relate that to eating your own dogfood.
Excited to brainstorm ways to make organizing fun, I think that’s indeed going to be very important.
In my mind, it’s quite the contrary. I hate prefigurative practices because they are a coping mechanism more often than not. Also they are set “outside” whatever system you’re working with and therefore have no impact except on the people involved. Yeah, they can be healing for some, but overall they turn into a form of escapism, which is paralyzing.
Here I’m talking about the practice of actually doing the thing you have to do: flyering and talking to workers will give you more insights than sociologist analysis, designing processes and software for grassroot organizations or unions will give you more insight than any blog post about it (and they are not many anyway lol), mediating a conflict between two participants will make you a better mediator more than a book about mediation and so on.
This is in opposition to prefigurative and performative actions because they bring you to polar opposite conclusions: practice tells you you’re within the system, you’re grounded inside the phenomena you want to change and therefore you have agency. Prefigurative politics brings you outside whatever system you want to change, which is good to fuel imagination, but by itself takes away agency because it gives you the hope of staying outside the system. Therefore, you lose whatever agency you have because it’s an act of disengagement. But we are going abstract and philosophical here, which is another thing that should be avoided because most people won’t care, lol
I’m the founder/architect of Alchemists and have been interested in this for some time but struggling to gain momentum or make an impact.
I run my own company (which is only me and my team of bots). I created the company with the idea of building a collective/co-op. That’s always been the dream (and still is) but very hard to find folks that think this way in terms of being independent, yet connected and supporting each other.
I’ve also read You Deserve A Tech Union by Ethan Marcotte which is very much line with what is being discussed here but, again, I’m coming at this from the perspective of building a collective of independent owners fighting for better rights, health care, etc. than being an actual employee. Ultimately, what I’d like to achieve is:
Forming a collective of professional engineers that support and fight for one other to find client work, collaborate, pool resources, etc. so everyone can live the life they want.
Establish a union (if that’s possible) that works more at a global level which has the power and money to fight on all engineer’s behalf (possible more of a pipe dream but good to dream big).
Establish health care at the collective level to help everyone survive when times are tough but also not be destroyed if your health declines. In the US this is always tied to the employer, unfortunately. Ideally, what I’d want to see is universal health care at the country level but, minus that, maybe there is a way to create universal health care at the collective level (or all engineers that want create a larger pool for all to benefit).
In some sense I’m sort of talking about an Engineer’s Guild that has the power to lobby and fight on behalf of all engineers.
Hi, I’m Victoria, I live in Berlin, Germany where I am chair of our Workers Council at a Mercedes-Benz tech company.
I found this forum through Drew’s blog post which was shared with the Berlin Tech Workers Coalition, figured I’d say hi. So, here we are.
Even though nearly every other Mercedes daughter company is already unionized under IG Metall (some since decades), mine is not. We are relatively new to the Mercedes Cinematic Universe, have an almost entirely immigrant workforce, and are considered part of the Berlin “tech industry”, such as it is.
My employer’s policies that contribute to climate arson in no way reflect my own.
It seems like it’ll be an advantage that a lot of other Mercedes-related workplaces are unionized, and could provide support and expertise for your own organizing efforts.
Do you know how much the unions here are leading climate policy for the company? It seems like a good opportunity to put pressure on them to adopt policies like R&D investments in electrification, a concrete commitment to cease production of fossil fuel-powered vehicles, R&D investments in more climate-friendly means of transit like mass transit, etc. I suspect that it would be in the union’s interest to lead this discussion both to put a thumb on the incentives to de-carbonize, but also to make sure that de-carbonization is worker-led and includes things like training and knowledge transfer programs – rather than waiting for regulators to force the company’s hand without the workers at the wheel.
What do you think? What are your plans to get your workplace organized?
Mercedes previously bet the farm on electrification and is now unwinding that bet, with the support of the SPD and southern IG Metall leadership. We already had a commitment to end ICE vehicles and we blew it.
Last year I went to our Group Works Meeting in Sindelfingen and the speeches from some of the attendees were strongly in favor of this, with lots of hard words for the Greens. There is not much we can influence on that from our tiny Berlin office, unfortunately.
Yes, of course. Unionization efforts started here about two years ago; I was elected to our works council last year and am now leading the effort to reach our 50% membership goal. We now have the fastest growing IGM membership across the city’s tech companies, I’m told.
I’m an open-source advocate & developer in the US. I have donated to Drew because of his amazing projects & talent, and encourage others to do so.
I left the corporate world after a decade, burnt out from trying to change a broken system from within. It became clear that my energy was better spent building alternatives, even with the financial uncertainty.
The core problem I witnessed is a culture that actively rewards corporate capture. I saw colleagues advance their careers to senior positions at top tech companies by championing expensive, proprietary software. These systems weren’t chosen on merit; they were pushed through by vendors offering perks, creating a powerful sense of obligation. This dynamic creates a clear path to success for those willing to play along.
For open-source advocates, this is demoralizing. We are forced to abandon meaningful contributions to FOSS projects that solve fundamental problems. Instead, our skills are diverted to learning and maintaining gimmicky, closed-source abstractions that only serve to deepen vendor lock-in and enable a broader strategy of public surveillance.
This system is upheld by placing immense pressure on our most vulnerable colleagues, especially those on precarious visas who face dire consequences if they dissent. This is why individual action fails. Unionizing is our only real alternative to gain the collective power to reject these practices, protect our colleagues, and refuse to build the architecture of our own oppression.
I share your frustrations with how software procurement tends to work, and I agree that we need to break the individual mold in tech in order to start making changes.
What are you doing now that you’ve left the corporate world? Found greener pastures?
I’m nrv, a french web developer and unionist at a french union for digital, consulting and video game workers (Solidaires Informatique).
For now I’m not focusing on unionization of my current workplace, I spend most of my activist time as helping other members and on doing bureaucratic work in my union. I also do stuff with workers from other fields as my union is part of a group of unions (l’union syndicale Solidaires).
In the tech sector of France we experience a great deal of union repression in the workplace (discrimination, intimidation, sacking and even criminal prosecution in the most extreme cases). I imagine this is a reality in other countries.
One specificity of French tech is that it’s mostly structured around subcontracting via service companies, which complicates unionization efforts.
France have a strong worker history on few sectors, but it remains very weak in tech.
I’m convinced that organizing workers on a massive scale is one of the only ways out of the ecological and democratic impasses we’re experiencing, so I share the Unionize or die point on Drew’s blog post.
And because many tech companies are international, so should be our organizing! And even for national companies: they all depends on services from companies from other countries.
Welcome! I think France is well equipped to make the transition to organized tech labor precisely because it has such strong labor traditions to draw from, and to inspire solidarity with. On an international scale I hope that we can draw lessons from the French abroad as well. Nice to see you here!
I’m a web developer from the UK based in Berlin. I’ve got a long history of open source development and community management. In fact, contributing to open source was how I learned to code!
Berlin has a big culture based around works councils, but as far as I know true unions are not as common. Certainly, tech workers don’t seem to be as involved in collectivization as workers from other industries. We do have the Tech Workers Coalition that @chobeat mentioned, which is a great resource. I’ve not got involved with them yet (and probably won’t until I pass probation in this new job) but I think it would be foolish not to in the longer term.
Let’s get organized and do something about this mess we’re in.
Keep us updated on your progress!