because these statements are instrumental to building power. They are not a draft of a negotiation proposal. They are a galvanizing message for workers, not a formal demand. Without power, formal demands are pointless. To build power, clarity, concreteness and directness beats idealism, rigour and formalism every day.

I’ve been in tech labor organizing for 8 years at this point. I know written documents matter pretty much nothing for organizing, let alone tech workers organizing. And yes, tech workers need a simple language.

The statement you’ve written is very good to argue on the internet, but it closes any avenue for picking winnable issues in the real world. If the original one sets a clear, achievable goal (canceling a new contract), the one you wrote prevents any kind of realistic demand and sets an unachievable goal for a newly formed union.

If you speak a language workers don’t understand, you increase the cognitive load and lower interest and participation. It’s a trade-off and it’s an ineliminabile part of the game. Being correct and being useful are two different things

It’s labor organizing, not intellectual engagement. The point is to build power in the company, not argue about vocabulary. Words are instrumental, they are not the goal.

I’m part of TWC and the organization of this call and I’m Italian. There are different timezones but it’s obviously hard to include all of them. Including UTC wouldn’t help most people.

The very fact that there are two events for two distinct timezones doesn’t suggest there’s an attempt to reach out to a bigger crowd?

The Global chapter of Tech Workers Coalition

The Session A time zone is good for Europeans too. Session B I guess could work for East Asia.

Why do you see this as USA-only?

Freedom of information is freedom for the most powerful to use that information for their profit. The more powerful you are, the more tools you have to harness common goods for profit.

God forbid a technical person becomes an adult and starts understanding power, money, and politics. Engineers should be babies playing with their toys and being idealistic and irresponsible about their impact on the world.

because Facebook trained an LLM on Libgen data. I mean, I wouldn’t be surprised if at some point some big tech considered to at least fund some of these projects through side-channels, because nowadays open source and liberation of information means free lunches for American big tech, but that’s very different from Anna’s archive being a psyop to externalize content theft.

It took me a second to realize this was a joke. There are people who seriously believe Anna’s Archive is funded/supported by big tech to concentrate copyrighted material to be used for AI training.

If you want a sandwich, you have to make it.

because it is relevant in different communities, no?

yeah, it’s quite big, because in a way it’s the biggest win so far for the BDS in American tech.

You’re focusing too much on the WordPress example. There are a dozen tools mentioned in the article that will clarify what’s possible.

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A CMS is a specific type of no-code software. N8N or Appsmith are definitely not a CMS

I understood your message very clearly. It’s sad to work for most companies. It’s the default and it’s completely preposterous to suggest they want to work for TikTok specifically. It’s what was available to them. Pitying striking workers makes no sense. There’s nothing to look deeper into.

they want severance pay. Don’t shame workers for trying to make a living, you scab