What Are Your Thoughts on Labor in the Tech Industry?

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Wendy Liu: The relative lack of organizing, I do mean among kind of the white color part of the tech industry. You know, obviously, we've seen a lot of organizing around Amazon warehouses and it looks like the Teamsters are going to be stepping up their efforts as well. So that's not to say that there's no kind of hope that things aren't happening in this industry. But now that they might be facing more pressure, it will be interesting to see if that happens more on that level two.

Paris Marx is joined by Wendy Liu to discuss what it was like to work in tech in the 2010s and why structural changes in the industry are empowering an increasingly reactionary capitalist class to strike back at workers and upend the expectations of the boom period.

Wendy Liu is a writer and the author of Abolish Silicon Valley: How to Liberate Technology from Capitalism. You can follow her on Twitter at @dellsystem.

Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Follow the podcast (@techwontsaveus) and host Paris Marx (@parismarx) on Twitter, and support the show on Patreon.

The podcast is produced by Eric Wickham and part of the Harbinger Media Network.

Also mentioned in this episode:

Casey Newton and Zoe Schiffer wrote about how tech CEOs are inspired by what Musk is doing at Twitter
Mel Krantzler and Patricia Krantzler wrote Down and Out in Silicon Valley: The High Cost of the High-tech Dream
Jacob Silverman wrote about David Sacks and the reactionary turn of tech billionaires
Paris wrote about how longtermism is designed to justify the position of billionaires in society
Julia Black wrote about the embrace of pronatalism within the tech industry

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