Unions at Google?

March 8, 2008

Why won't we ever see scenes like this one from the Battle of the Overpass in front of a corporation like Google or Microsoft? Despite the presence of an effort like The Washington Alliance of Technical Workers (Wash Tech), there seem to be few efforts to unionize high tech workers.

Browsing on the Internet for past articles on this topic, it turned out that one reason people are skeptical about the possibility of a union for tech workers is that these workers are already well compensated.. as opposed to the service employees of the world who definitely need collective representation. This past month Google faced a union rally demanding union representation for a hotel about to be opened. But that is the point: this is not about actual Google workers; it is about service sector employees.

I have also seen the argument that creative work like that done by tech workers at Google would be stifled by an extra layer of bureaucracy. But Walter Reuther was a dye caster.. which, while a physical job, was highly skilled machine work. I don't see much of a difference between that kind of physical creative work and that done by tech workers today.

I would like to propose a more conceptual reason for the difficulty of forming a union at Google or Microsoft. Corporations like these fashion themselves in a quite different way than a place like Ford Motor Company or General Motors used to. The corporation is becoming more than a place to work, but also an identity. Note the YouTube video below on the experience of working at Google:

Working at Google is more all-encompassing than work at Ford would have been in the 1930s, at least at the level of the average employee. The more successful a corporation is at fashioning itself as a "family" or "lifestyle" the less unionizing will be a cognitive option for people employed there.

Unions depend upon a perception of the world that is class-based. There is the "worker" and the "management".. and the rights of the worker will be abridged without collective representation. Identification as a "worker" brings with it a broader sense of being part of the working class. Union systems have been used by professional ball players and Hollywood writers to get a larger share of profits, but the politically powerful labor unions of the past were focused on what we would call the working class. A worker at Ford Motor Company did not see his/her identity aligned with that of the corporation.. rather with that of a social class employed by multiple corporations. The split inability of a corporation to establish itself as a central identity meant that workers would see their relationship as adversarial.

This is one of many points where perceptions of identity work their way into our everyday world. We can argue till we are blue in the face about the way globalization has undermined unions.. but we are missing a key part of the issue if we neglect the perceptual changed that have occurred in the corporate world over the past generation.