Unions: The way to hack society's operating system

everyone this is a Rob and he's going to talk to us about unions play attention should be some interesting stuff thank you all right hi everybody so by way of brief introduction I'm a software developer obviously and tick wise my job is pretty typical so I write some Python I write some SQL queries I run some Linux servers but I guess list of goals that I work for the trade union movement and so after I got a job working for the Australian Council of trade unions I'm surprised to find that a lot of tech people don't really see the point of unions and it's not necessarily that they they don't like unions maybe they just don't see how unions kind of fit into their lives now startup that unions have been responsible for all sorts of things that make our our lives more bearable eight-hour day superannuation paid leave and stats show that Union people enjoy better pay and conditions but I don't want this to be a history lesson and I feel like that's how a lot of people in the tech world or perceive unions they think it's kind of past history maybe the thing in unions think of a photo like this and these harsh conditions at the dock or down a coal mine and there's same kind of a world away from today's a comfortable tech officers we've got great salaries air conditioning free food slide but the slides between the floors all that sort of stuff but I think that's a mistake because it's easier when you're sitting in an expensive office chair to forget the reality of how employment actually works and so I thought we'd remind ourselves with a simple diagram and now while this might not look like it at first this diagram is actually an accounting diagram and so I'm here on the left yeah the diagram as a whole is all the money that a particular company brings in every single year okay so for a company like Google it's obviously a lot of money and this diagram represents all the all the different things that money their money goes towards and so over here on the left we have raw materials and so in a traditional business that's things like as things like factories raw materials in a software company it's like offices and servers on the cloud that sort of thing so the next chunk of money goes towards paying stuff so all the employees they all get salaries and that's that money there and the rest of the money goes towards the owners and so the stuff here in the middle that's the stuff that our people get who go to work every day and do a job and the stuff down the end that's from the owners people to get money from owning owning the right paperwork rather than the actual work that they do now in a small start-up obviously this the line between those two sections is very blurry because you have people who work in both roles so in a start-up a lot of startup employees especially if the early employees they own stock Mark Zuckerberg for some reason even though he makes billions a year from Facebook keeps keeps turning up and going to work and presumably does some productive work while he's there but in the context of a larger business the situation is crystal clear so and Walmart in the United States for example Walmart happens to employ one percent of the entire US workforce which ones are being about two million people and they all get money from a section in the middle people who own Walmart it's mostly owned by for children who are the children of the founder they or they they get the money from down the end and we've been we've been conditioned to believe that this sort of arrangement is actually normal but if you stop and think about it it seems bonkers that you can get thousands of times more from owning things than the people they actually do all the work people actually do all the work or in the middle but that's they they have to split that they have to split that chunk by two million the other chunk is is split by like four or so for the most part and that's where this massive inequality that we have in society today comes from so you might be thinking okay well you know that's how does it Walmart we know Walmart as a terrible place to work we know that employees get treated bad there but you know and a great modern tech company like Google the situation is surely different and in fact a very similar dynamic is taking place so here there's all the money that is left over at the various tech giants per employee after all the salaries have been paid out and so this this is this is pure profit and Facebook is making an extra six hundred dollars per employee after after they paid out all the salaries and similarly staggering numbers for all these other tech giants and all this money is money that employers mat employees make that workers make the door work but that gets taken from them and given to somebody else and in fact the same relationship is a play not only in the context of individual firms but the overall economy so the best selling economics book for the last few years has been capital in that in the 21st century by Thomas Piketty and so that's fundamentally a discussion of this relationship in the broader economy and so as you mentioned the capital is one of those terms with many many meanings sometimes it's referred to the physical things like farm machinery that generate economic output but Piketty uses a more legal sense so it means anything that you can only gali that gives you a flow of money so that can include ownership and physical equipment I'm also also more abstract things like intellectual property and stocks and land titles and and all the rest and so that's the way I'm using it in this discussion and that diagram I showed you before the third box with the Fat Controller from Thomas the Tank Engine that is there as there represents capital income so locally refers to these these two shares as labor share of the national income and capital share of the national income national income being all that all the money that you're the that a country's economy generates every year and so their relationship was not only an economic reality and a statistical reality but it's a political reality and in fact it's the story of modern politics at least in the dimensions of economics and social class so it's a conflict between the forces of those who get paid for doing the work rather than the ownership class and between the interests of the workers and the interest of Capital of course these are hardly new ideas and so back again to this chart at least the two sections on the right that involve people so this dividing line is not fixed where it's drawn at the moment as as determined by a whole heap of interacting laws systems and institutions that form the society that we live in today but we can actually change those things and move the line and fundamentally that's the goal of unions is to move this line and make the left side of the box bigger so why shouldn't the people who do all the work get to decide what to do with the money instead of providing material luxury for a very few we use it to provide better conditions for absolutely everyone it's important to note here that half of society doesn't work and the traditional sense because they're unemployed or children or disabled or elderly or whatever else but it's still obviously hard work looking for a job or raising children or dealing with a disability everybody deserves a decent standard of living and to be treated with respect no no matter if they happen to be valuable in a narrow market sense or not and so when we talk about more powerful workers we mean more power for these people to the money that flows at the moment mostly to super yachts and sports cars for mega rich people should be going to give everybody an absolutely a decent standard of living and to allow even the worst of people in society to be treated with respect and dignity so what's really at stake here isn't just a bit of extra cash in the hand each week obviously getting a whole heap of extra money would be great but like I said a lot of us tech workers we may be doing okay financially and we've all seen Breaking Bad and there was a real lesson there there are a whole pile of extra money it doesn't necessarily need to happiness and so as to so um nevertheless bad things can happen to us when we least expect it I myself wasn't a union member until a few years ago I joined mostly for ideological reasons rather than for any urgent practical need but then a few months after I had a little free speech incident so this wasn't a James Tamura type situation where I said something bigoted I was punching upwards not downwards but nevertheless I look couple of days like I might get fired or something obviously this was a super stressful experience but it's made a lot less stressful because I had a union representative who helped me through it advised me even attended meetings with me to help resolve the issue so in this way being a union member is kind of like an insurance policy where you think you probably don't need it right up until you really really need it when I moved to Australia I joined professionals Australia which is a union that represents tech workers and scientists they also provide the sort of support and advice at work luckily I've had no more free speech incidents and so I haven't tested them out and this regard but they also do useful things like advise you on contracts and salaries tell you if you're being underpaid and they're lobbying work to represent our interests things like celery transparency gender diversity in the workplace IP law and climate change there's also a really great union called Australian services Union or ASU that cover people in our line of work and two really good things anyway as I said most people who work in tech are doing okay financially and they're and they're pretty secure in their jobs but what we won't be on money and beyond are perhaps less stress in our jobs is interesting and meaningful work we want to work on the problems that interest us using the tools that we prefer and the operating systems we prefer for that matter and trouble is that needless to say every workplace has its problems that get in the way of this to a greater or lesser extent if you've been a developer for long enough you've seen projects fail not for technical reasons but for management reasons you've seen developers work unpaid overtime seen management by the wrong software for the wrong reasons seen a terrible proprietary software get pushed on clients just for the sales kickbacks or maybe you've just been forced to put up with bigoted and unacceptable contact from managers and watch them get away with it or you might just work in a soulless office where it's too noisy to do you create to do your best creative work so unions can help change change these things for the better and we can and we really should demand better why don't we get a seat at the table when all these decisions are made in countries with higher union membership rates than Australia unions literally have a seat table so in Sweden unions appoint directors to the board of directors of all firms with over 25 employees similar arrangements exist in other Scandinavian countries and in the large economies like France and Germany in Europe so instead of workers simply crossing their fingers and hoping for Google's owners to do no evil why not simply join together with their colleagues and demand that their dinner evil it's us who should be making decisions about the future of Technology because after all we built it but for some reason we just put up with it instead of demanding better can you imagine software developers ever striking just picturing it seems kind of unthinkable seems like train drivers know how to do it but not us but this absolutely no reason why we couldn't if we work together we'd have some real power to make some change imagine if Google's ops team went on strike imagine the change that could create because there's strength in numbers and if you make positive change within your workplace that has flow-on effects to the rest of society also for instance if tech workers worked together to stop employers avoiding tax with tax havens they would make more tax available for health care infrastructure education and decent welfare and all the other things that make make for a good society I feel like this is one big case of impostor syndrome as a profession we're naturally skeptical of our own judgement and we're full of self-doubt but meanwhile we're letting those who lay any self-doubt run the whole show there's a conflict going on but it's not being fought on equal terms as Warren Buffett says here the conflict is very one-sided and here's how that looks in practice so here's a low-wage warehouse exploited Jeff Bezos mr. do no evil himself Larry Page and privacy violator Sheryl Sandberg with Mike Pence and Donald Trump and of course tech companies have a long history of collaborating with fascists and white supremacists just as IBM and its subsidiaries did during World War two and remember also Silicon Valley's entire business model is based on shirking regulations to exploit cheap labor uber isn't particularly innovative technically it's kind of a marginally slick a taxi ordering experience but it's real innovation is to profit from the exploitation of low-wage workers this tweet from high profile Silicon Valley venture capitalist Paul Graham it's a polite way of saying there's plenty of money to be made by stealing from working people and exploiting them for profit so these people are working directly against our interests so time we united and worked directly against theirs so returning to this diagram the nature of the conflict is simple it's two parts very straightforward however capitalism it's very good at obscuring the nature of the conflict or even denying that it exists the capital ownership class is full of ghost stories about how the owners job creators and the system would collapse without them destroying civilization while insisting you're the you're the only ones keeping it together takes a special kind of dishonesty and yet here we are Fredric Jameson famously said that it's easier to imagine the end of the world than imagine the end of capitalism we know the planets getting destroyed we know politicians and the median lie they know that we know they lie but nonetheless the system continues on the main problem is it's hard to picture what a different world would look like there's been afraid Eurovision particularly after the last 30 years of neoliberal consensus reaganomics and the sabotage and collapse of any rivals to Western capitalism so how do we go about working towards an alternative without resorting to naive utopianism well while the USA and the UK seem to be heading further and further towards total autocracy and while Australia seems eager to follow in their footsteps other countries are setting examples that give us more hope and so here's a chart of the level of public ownership in various countries and there might be a little hard - there might be a little hard to read but the the message here is that if our goal is common ownership there are governments that are doing a pretty good job of actually moving towards all that in recent decades most of the first world economies have moved towards complete privatization China - which is the red line has seen a shift of wealth into private hands as it has adopted my based reforms but as you can see Norway has bucked the trend in a big way even at the start of the graph that 1978 it was higher than the others and a steadily growing over time so Norway ones I'm having 60% of its wealth in public hands and every other country has a near zero a big part of the reason for this is that Norway has a massive fund of capital that's held in common public ownership and this is taken directly from the funds website as you can see there it owns more than one percent of all the publicly traded stock in the world as well as quite a lot of real estate so the total size of the fund is approaching one trillion US dollars or a turn on thousand US dollars for every single Norwegian so no I initially built this fund from the proceeds of its domestic oil resources but it's now invested in non oil resources internationally including in things like real estate in New York obviously not every country is lucky enough to discover vast quantities of natural resources but fundamentally all capital really works in the same way every country has income generating capital in the form of real estate and stocks and whatever else and all it's really required as the political will to grab it up and put more of it in common ownership the real achievement here isn't discovering oil but actually keeping it in public hands sadly while Australia has had a similarly historic resource boom in recent years they haven't been able to do what Norway did and instead of the wealth benefiting us all it's all flowed into billionaires pockets but the point is that anybody can do this nobody else has a pull of capital the size as as Norway's but many countries can set up funds like this and plenty already have so New Zealand has had a similar but much smaller fund for many years now comfortably contributions were suspended immediately a decade or so got so ago when the right-wing government took power but under just under a Dern's New Labour government they've immediately resumed contributions and this was the moment when they did and they all seemed pretty happy about it but if we want to move towards common ownership of the means of production we need something grander than just running a few funds here in the air in an otherwise privately-owned economy if we're truly going to put ourselves in control need a plan to transition the lion's share of capital into public ownership so back in the 1970s another Scandinavian country called Sweden started informing implementing a plan to do just this so the plan enabled the creation of what were called wage earner funds which would move a percentage of a company's profits into the control of unions and the wider public so in the course of a few decades more and more control would would flow to unions themselves who would eventually run the capital entirely and the funds would flow to the public as a whole such a plan low only became imaginable because Sweden had exceptionally strong unions nearly 80% of the workforce in Sweden at the time was unionized and today in Australia it's less than 20 percent unfortunately this plan failed in the long term and in the face of predictable opposition from business interests but technically it was sound highly pragmatic and a useful example of how in the long term we could build a future beyond late stage capitalism but the lesson here is that when against the forces of the ownership class there's no alternative but to directly challenge capital and to build the forces to do so as Warren Buffett said they're making war against us every day and winning because sadly they're better at organizing than we are so we can't form an effective challenge unless we rebuild organized labor built institutions large and powerful enough to take on the enemy our software developers are in a unique position to do that because we're one of the few jobs that isn't getting automated out of existence we have a stronger negotiating position in the labour market now gives us strength to make change if only we dare to use it by unionizing tech workers are also in a unique position to be able to help build the tools to make a swim the front page story of The Sydney Morning Herald today was literally about unions and the technology they use so it seems like it's pretty important stuff campaigns though are often run on poor quality a proprietary organizing software because we haven't built better alternatives yet it's also way harder than it should be to actually sign up to a union online but I am working on that well when by helping people communicate and build solidarity and find common ground and good software helps to do that even small projects can make a big difference the site for instance is built by a union called United voice that allows hospitality workers to do exactly what it says on the label which is rate their boss for somebody stuck in a bad job something like this can mean the difference between them feeling like they're alone in their struggle and instead feeling like there are others out there perhaps in a similar situation or at least supporting their cause and it's from that feeling of shared cause that real change actually happens the scale of political problems can make them seem very severe and hard to change or we're at a pivotal moment and politics the last 30 years of neoliberal consensus have collapsed people are angry because they know that the system is screwing them over unfortunately without a coherent alternative people will turn to white supremacists hucksters like Trump and if we don't defeat the forces of capital or will do is turn to racism and hatred and defeat each other that's unfortunately our future unless we go ahead and actually build an alternative so I'll leave you with this quote by the great Ursula Le Guin who sadly died a couple of days ago our art is code and their art has great power all we have to do is choose to actually use it thanks [Applause] yeah many Christians well because not everyone has the talent and ability to do that and much of the economy runs on things that have high barriers to entry like very difficult to set up a you know power company or a telco if you're if you've got you know no money or anything it's it's a you know you need to be on a certain economic level to to start there any other questions yes how widespread is open-source software within the union movement mm well it's growing unfortunately a lot of campaigning software is still running on proprietary proprietary things like nation builder so unfortunately in the NGO space nation builders very dominant and costs cost NGOs a lot of money that they could otherwise be using on campaigning and also it's pretty ineffective generally so yeah like I said building these alternatives is important down the front well I suppose if you don't like oh sorry other Pez ma appears to be a bosses union is there any viable alternatives to break out of that okay so I guess if you don't like the particular union that covers you you look for an alternative union like ASU also covers software developers and there's also the potential of starting starting different unions or getting involved in the one that you could join but don't like very much and reforming it from within I guess it's a it's like any other aspect of politics you just have to get involved and try and influence things the way you want to influence them up the back there yep so so the question is how do you reconcile unionism with the idea of universal basic income which may need some explanation first if you understand that yes I most people probably know what universal basic income is but it's the concept of everybody receiving a fixed amount of money every month and and all all the same money no matter what situation you're in so obviously they're there I think that ties in with building a common ownership of capital quite nicely because if you have a if you have a large fund of commonly owned capital that's generating money all the time you can use that to fund scheme schemes like universal basic income or or whatever else you think is going to be of benefit to everybody as opposed to a few any other questions yes question is how do we make Union unionism more fashionable particularly in the media yeah it certainly gets a bad rap in the media and you know as we've seen with a train strike oftentimes they get cast as the bad guys even though the train network is getting run you know way over capacity and it's in it's fair enough for them to you know protest those conditions any way they can so I guess again it's about building solidarity and building building institutions that are alternatives to the to the media who who basically get my the media gets run effectively by the owners of the media and so will always represent their viewpoint to a certain extent but if we build if we build other institutions other opposing institutions from there from there we can change it but there's there's no easy answer to to media games because fundamentally it's all it's all PR and that's it's a money driven exercise anyone else I have another have a question if that's okay as an employer sorry Lindsey as an employer in the tech industry I've observed that many tech companies some of the with ones you've managed to keep this on focus to tech actually do treat their employees quite well they fight for them and give them I don't know back rubs and sushi and stuff and so like really what you know when when the employee is the asset and the tech company has to compete for them you can see why they don't really think that unions are particularly relevant so how would you make unions relevant in a world where the brains are the other capital that tech companies fight over yeah well I guess like we are a bit comfortable in a lot of ways like a little bit a little a little bit too happy and you know laughs a little bit too easy and and certain ways for for for us tikkis but you know I I guess it's about thinking thinking of the wide world and and it's less about like but material conditions than decision-making for instance like Bill Gates money the money that he's accumulated he's not using it like it's more than he could ever spend but he's using it to make decisions about health policy and education policy and you know just because you're good at you know selling selling copies of software doesn't mean that it gives you the right to make those decisions on behalf of everybody else we should be making those more collectively so yeah it's about thinking wider I think Lindsey question is do you think that a tech worker specific union would be viable in Australia and if so what should its top 3 outcomes or priorities be trouble is that at the moment you union membership among private sector tech workers is really really low and limits it's part of my motivation for this talk but I think perhaps it needs to get a little bit bigger before a separate union is viable but maybe it would be a good idea obviously it would be focused on doing the things I've talked about building more I guess more self-determination for tech workers I influence an over policy IP but then also contributing like because you know tech workers can make a lot of money contributing to a broader society and and common capital ownership would be would be good another question over here is that question for me I can answer it but I'm just weak oh we've already phrase the question if I can the question is if it's easy why should we choose freedom well yeah okay I guess you have to be motivated by thinking about something wider and thinking about the state of the world at large the comment was well fed people don't start revolutions yeah well I don't think um it seems like there isn't going to be revolution anytime soon or we can do it's like recognize the situation we're in move towards alternatives unfortunately last question up the back Maps sorry there's a few clauses in that question I'm just gonna have to step through that slowly translate that can you just repeat the first part Collective Bargaining so could we use collective bargaining that unions provide to enable users to have more freedom individually yeah well obviously if you have mornig oshi ating power in your workplace you can make better demands a few a few as a as a workforce think that free software is important you can and you've got negotiating power you can demand to work on that you can make you can demand that your employer contributes more to it and and you can demand that your company acts more ethically so plenty of ways to influence that in more direction it's about you know using using the negotiating power that you have at your disposal certainly yes yeah awesome we actually have quite a fair bit of time so if we want to keep going on this happy to put any more questions yeah I think I blasted through that a little fast so yeah if you have more questions asking now will come up or whatever anyone else real good one more yep so the question is what would you suggest for contractors and perhaps more broadly you know what role could unions play with you know contractors and individual relationships between individuals and businesses yeah I mean part of the problem with employment law over over the recent years is that the the nature of employment is that it's become progressively more casualized contracts have become progressively weaker and so you a lot of people lack those protections less than half of the of the workforces and stable full-time work most people are on insecure country and secure contract and you know contracting is as you know it's it's nice work if you can get it and you're getting paid but it's also very insecure getting fired at short notice and having people not pay the bills that leaves you with very little protection and there and there is very little you can do under the law to remedy that and that that really sucks so I mean the long-term solution for that is about getting getting better employment law and more powerful people in that situation and that ties into the whole collective solidarity and getting ourselves more rights Thanks any other questions no we're all good I happen to just to add something to this I'm a small business employer I I'd love to have a little debate afterwards if anyone wants to join in about what it takes to employ tech people in the long term and what it takes to retain them I'm quite proud of that Lindsay is an ex-employee of mine and all might actually there's about five or six of them here at the conference very proud of that the relationship I've had it's not something for everyone to be that kind of person and we've done it without unions but I'd love to actually have that as a as a as a data point if you're interested you still work out right I work harder than everyone else you know that's okay yeah you know if you were if you're working if you're working hard then you know you're working you're a good guy probably sure Thanks thanks everyone

Channel: LinuxConfAu 2018 - Sydney, Australia

Views: 372

Rating: 3.8235295 out of 5

Keywords: lca, lca2018, #linux.conf.au#linux#foss#opensource, RobertLechte

Id: egZJ_ZWTNuo

Length: 34min 29sec (2069 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 12 2018