Organizing IT Workers

By trade would be silly. There are loads of IT workers in my local government offices say, no point organising them with Microsoft programmers say. IT's not a self-contained industry in itself.

Are you an IT worker? I ask as I'm curious as to the motives behind the thread.

This got started on another thread, about Organizing Workers. Among IT workers there is a distinction I'd
make between three groups:

1. Capital goods industries. These industries produce hardware and software used by other industries, such as makers of software tools, microchip manufacturers, makers of computer servers, routers, networking software, and so on.

2. Workers in the "retail" end of high-tech, that is, internet-based businesses that orient to ordinary consumers, such as amazon, ebay, and other so-called dotcoms.

3. Workers who perform IT functions -- sysadmins, application programmers, etc. -- in large companies in other industries, such as banks or auto manufacturers or government administration.

Flint and I work in area (1).

t.

from saturday's nyt:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/27/us/27freelance.html
“Our ultimate goal is to update the New Deal. It is to create a new safety net that’s connected to the individual as they move from job to job.”
i've seen their ads in the subway for quite some time

well, perhaps. but i find this idea rather dubious. I'm a freelancer. I'm a member of the National Writers Union, which has a chapter of freelance writers in the high tech sector in the Bay Area. it's power and presence is nil. at one point about a dozen years ago they got the idea of being a labor exchange, a place to hear about jobs. but they can't compete with the Society for Technical Communication, a traditional trade association -- it doesn't deal with working conditions or criticize employers -- which has a larger membership and a much larger jobs list. i don't think it makes sense to pick a particular group by their freelance or temp status to organize -- they are one of the weakest groups. it would make more sense to organize them together with the people on staff, to gain more collective leverage.

t.

This is correct.

Cheers for the clarification. Right well 1 is an industry, and industry-wide industrial organising would seem sensible, to prevent gains by one company's workers causing the company to lose out via competition to firms with worse wages and conditions.

hey, i was just throwin' it out there. it isn't a union in any sense, it seems to be an insurance broker, with the commissions raised going to "advocacy." but it does raise the issue of portability, and that entails "the worker not the job."

the desireability of portability of the union, going with the worker from job to job, isn't limited to temps. if, for example, you were organizing the food service/restaurant sector in a city, you'd want that because it's most likely when someone leaves one place they'll do something similar elsewhere, and you'd like them to help spread the union.

t.

like Flint, i work for a contracting agency, but in my case it's a "captive" agency that works, I think, only for one software tool maker. it's just a scam to improve their labor "flexibility".

t.

It's very common in the Israeli public sector to erode workers` benefits by employing through a contractor - they then can't become members of the workplace union, thus forfeiting all benefits.

organizing the worker not the job is a pipe dream

it creates no stability and only works with the most militant and radical of workers.

years of bouncing between jobs and staying in the union without the "benefits" of being in a union wear folks out.

a toe hold in these industries must be gained by winning contracts, building leadership in those jobs, and expanding.

only then does portability work.

in indiana workers move from casino to casino and stay in the union. shop stewards can even move and maintain some amount of leadership.

Chuck: "organizing the worker not the job is a pipe dream."

Another of your false dichotomies. I wasn't talking about NOT organizing the job.

t.

i never said it was; but perhaps you're not imputing that

that, and i'd like them to be able to carry their benefits from employer to employer, inside and even outside their industry. this would surely increase material security and perhaps even increase class feeling. an article containing some information about this is here: http://www.gladwell.com/2006/2006_08_28_a_risk.html

ummm...nope.

to organize the job you must organize the worker. to organize the worker you don't need to organize the job.

you only spoke of organizing the worker.

Chuck, what the fuck is your point? it seems to me here
that you're trying to find disagreement where none exists, in order to disagree for the sake of disagreeing.

do you know anything at all about the industry i work in?

t.

correct. i don't know anything about the industry you work in. so what?

I do know about organizing workers. If you agree with me then fine. but that wasn't what you said.

I think this thread is being derailed into a slug-fest. I may well find myself working in "high-tech", so I'm actually interested in discussing this whole IT organization thing. It might prove practically useful to me.

i'm not trying to rehash other debates.

I'll leave it like this: organizing high tech workers into whatever system high tech workers come up with is going to be the same as organizing any other workers.

i work in IT within higher education sector, and i dont think there is any sense in organising the IT workers as IT workers, but rather as workers in the particular industry. And thats the point of the whole industrial unionism malarky which aims to unite all workers within the same industry into same union.

So in an IT contractor house it would be from the IT geeks to the accountants and marketing people to the admin folk to the cleaners of the place.

I'm not an IT worker, but have read this with interest. This is one sector that those of outside the sector hear little about. And it's a key sector in the global economy.

Much as I dislike agreeing with someone who showed no courtesy or comradely manners towards myself, Tom, Kieran and others, I think there's an element of truth in what Chuck said.

How issues are framed, how committees or communication networks are formed, the basics are pretty much the same: worker involvment; worker input/control of issues; organization building from the ground up; keeping people involved; task sharing; information sharing and working out a winning game plan and all the rest.

mitch and chuck are certainly right that there is a great deal of overlap in terms of some of the basic requisites for organizing in the high-tech sector compared with others. i'll make one more comment about temps. temps in this industry are often only temps during certain periods. i worked first in "customer engineering", thence in software engineering, both as a staff writer, now as a freelancer. two of the people who organized DWA with me were temps then but now are on staff at the same company i work at now. this is not the only industry where this is true. but, to get back to my original point, i don't think it makes sense to organize temps as such, apart from the people on staff. they work together and go in and out of being staff or temp. organizing the industry and organizing the people go together in part because you want people to carry unionism to other workplaces. but neither of these points are peculiar to the computer industry.

in regard to those who do IT jobs in other industries such as banking or government or manufacturing, I think it would be best to organize them as part of that industry. i wouldn't want to make a dogma out of this. take janitors for example. do the janitors who clean the office buildings in the computer industry get organized in a union of the high tech industry -- if it existed -- or as janitors? I think it may make most sense to organize them as janitors because the cleaning contractors work many types of buildings, serving a variety of industries. and sometimes computer companies share buildings with other industries. the last staff job i had the company was in a big office building in S.F.'s financial district, a building shared with stockbrokers, and a variety of other industries besides software tool manufacture.

in a way, their industry is building operations and maintenance. but i wouldn't say that this is always true. my younger brother worked as a janitor in a shipyard. in that case it would have made most sense for him to be involved in a union of the shipyard.

t.

mitch...your not my comrade.

you don't believe in actually organizing workers...you believe in talking about organizing workers.

that being said. i show you the courtesy of responding to what you say with some thought. I'll keep doing it too.

oh mitch believes in organizing workers. like chuck, he was formerly a staff organizer. he's just not currently in a position to do so himself right now. people go thru a variety of situations in their lives, especially as they get older, acquire obligations like children. the movement needs to accommodate itself to these facts. by "movement" i'm not talking about self-serving union bureaucracies. chuck can blather about CtW business unions being a "social movement" and maybe in some places here and there there are some approximations to that but by and large I'd say it's bullshit. and it's not only "anarchists" who would agree with me, by a long shot.

Consider the following guy, his name is David. David is an old sailor, former member of SUP, a big guy with tattoos, retired for many years and living in a city public housing project. in the organizing that a comrade of mine was doing in that housing project David...a white guy...played an important role in part as an intensely anti-racist voice, in working class tones, in tenant meetings, very important to avoiding inter-racial concflicts in a huge housing project with African-American, Latino, Chinese, Vietnamese and white tenants, speaking a variety of langauges. neither David nor my comrade were "organizing workers." They were organizing tenants. is this form of organizing of no value, chuck?

okay, so this thread is about organizing IT workers. but so far, Chuck, you've not been a positive presence.

t.

this thread is about organizing IT workers. I gave my feedback.

1. You must organize work sites..not workers
2. Traveling unions don't work
3. There is no special way to organize IT workers
4. I think that if they are IT workers that work for a casino company they should be in my union. If they work for a building service company they should be in SEIU, hosptial SEIU, government AFSCME or AFGE, trucking companies Teamsters...etc. If they work for a solely IT company CWA.

what was not positive here?

now this is negative….

seems straight forward to me….

wow…that is negative. Did I cuss at you?

Then I said….

Wow…that was awful. How dare I…oh wait…I didn’t say anything.
But I have been cussed at and told I have have false dichotomies or whatever..

So where in my previous post I had I been uncourtesy…? Hmmmm….
Ya’ll just talk so much shit you don’t know where the truth is anymore…

now…see…that was rude…but pretty sure you fuckers always deserve it.

yeah…well….i’ll stop trying to give insight…
you seem to only like those that shut up and agree with you…
damn anarchists with all their opinions and shit…

Chuck, i'll listen to you as long as you're civil. i learn things from all kinds of people. you have intelligent things to say, but then you undermine the conversation with gratuitious insults. and at that point, frankly, you don't deserve to be given the time of day.

t.

tom you started the shit on this thread...not me. and frankly, you talk too much shit to be taken seriously by anyone other than the mentaly retarded.

Chuck, you made a point of disagreeing with something i said that actually agreed with you. disagreeing with people for the sake of disagreeing is what people would call "combative behavior." i've been wrong in the past, but i try to provide reasons for things i say, and i'll go with people if they can give me reasons that are persuasive. if you don't agree with something i say, you can always try to provide reasons to show me wrong.

t.

whatever tom. i'm bored of arguing with you about arguing with you.

if you have a disagreement with what i've said point it out. we can go from there.