My own path aligns with Ethan Marcotte’s. Obviously, he is older and more successful than me, but like I am (and want to be), Ethan is a web developer and writer. I remember reading Responsive Web Design when I started learning web design and development in 2012. Over the years, he’s evolved into not just a voice in the web community talking about design and tech, but also discussing ethics, politics, and labor rights. As we get older, we realize there’s more to our work than divs and flexbox, and there are systems in place that oppress workers and people in every way imaginable. This is a similar—but differently packaged—message to Mike Monteiro’s.

I preordered You Deserve a Tech Union because I like Ethan and his work and I am also passionately pro-union. I know A Book Apart is geared towards web design and development, and the point of the title is to engage tech workers who might not normally consider unionization, but really it should be called You Deserve a Union. Because everyone does deserve a union—except the bosses.

If you are in a technology field—even if you’re not in a highly technical role—you deserve this book, especially if you’re not already sold on the idea of unions in general or unions in tech specifically. Ethan explains why unions are important, both outside and inside of tech. He goes over why traditionally people don’t consider tech a good place for organizing, but he also highlights how a labor movement has been in the tech industry from the beginning.

There’s a basic history of labor organizing and labor laws in the United States. If you are well versed in labor issues in the US, this will be review. The early history of worker collective action in tech is new to me. When discussing tech workers speaking out against military contracting, both in the 60s and more recently, Ethan states:

[...] you might have noticed that my own morals and biases are showing a bit. On a personal level, I'm deeply troubled by the tech industry's entrenchment in the military industrial complex [...] But having said that, I do understand if you feel differently.

It’s part of his conversational style, but I felt it was odd in a book that is at its core a political book. Why should Ethan hide his morals when they are so obvious elsewhere throughout the book (and by the mere choice of writing this book)? Unions are some of the best expressions of true democracy and anarchism we have in this country. And if there’s one thing anarchists can agree on, it’s being against the military, with its very top-down, hierarchical structure and rigid set of rules and conformity. There’s a clear line from being pro-union to being anti-military.

This line from unions to anarchism got me to thinking: yes, unions are great—but they’re not the end goal. They’re a stepping stone to a better society where workers are in control of the company. A society where there are no stockholders, no boards of directors, no bosses. The workers are the bosses and yet no one is the boss. Every company a free association of workers. That’s the world I want to live in.

I’ve always been disgusted when someone says, “well, I’m just lucky to have this job” or “you should be lucky you weren’t laid off”—as if I owe a debt to the company. The company profits off of my labor, they are lucky to have me as an employee. We need to stop looking at companies as if they are giving us the benevolent gift of jobs, and instead see the relationship as it really is: they could not do anything without their employees. In a capitalist society, the only source of power an employee has is in solidarity with their fellow workers. Unions can give us the power to have a company say, “we’re lucky we have employees.”

Ethan writes about successful tech unionization efforts, at companies like Code for America, ActBlue, and Kickstarter, as well as unsuccessful campaigns, like at Mapbox. A Mapbox organizer laments, “We recognize the superiority of democracy in every part of life except at work.” I’ve heard Noam Chomsky say this exact same thing. This statement is true, but only at a surface level, as Chomsky would argue. In government, we profess democracy but really we live in a plutocracy. We have no direct representation. Our voices aren’t heard.

One way we can change our undemocratic work and society is through unionization. It’s an important first step. The more workers get together and act and think collectively, the more democratic a major portion of our lives will be. We will have power to ask for better pay, reduced hours, and better benefits. Maybe we’ll get closer to a 15-hour work week. Then we’ll have more time to think and be more engaged citizens. We can spend more time volunteering locally, providing mutual aid to our neighbors and beyond. We can spend more time thinking about what a better world would look like. We can have these discussions in our neighborhoods, cities, and counties. These efforts bubble up. In time, we’ll be able to spread democracy up to the state and national levels. We’ll live in a freer, more just, and kinder society. It all starts with unions.

The last chapter is really eye opening. It’s the message software engineers like myself need. Ethan asks us to think beyond the traditional idea of what a tech worker is. It’s not just software engineers and designers. Tech workers work in tech. That includes contractors, Uber drivers, social media moderators, the not-talked-about humans who help train machine learning models, even the janitors and food service workers that work at tech companies. We are all in this together, we are all helping making this technology happen. As in society, we need to band together in solidarity at the workplace with everyone to make the world a better place. As engineers, we’ve been paid well, while still being underpaid for the profit we’ve generated for the bosses. But what about social media moderators? Ethan asks us to think how profitable tech would be if it paid people fairly from the beginning. That includes the AI and machine learning trainers in Africa staring at image after image of what might be a cat for hours on end. How much has venture capitalism stolen from the workers and society at large?

Ethan closes with a long quote by Stanley Aronowitz describing the precariat.

Increasingly, the job as an institution is under siege, because employers—public and private—hire only on a contingent or contract basis and do not offer health care coverage, pensions, or paid holidays and vacations to a substantial portion of their workforce. In short, the precariat has expanded to include the new middle class, and once privileged professionally and technically qualified workers have even joined the proletariat, working in service jobs when they cannot find work—even precarious work—in their own fields.

We already have tech workers in the precariat: gig workers (“contractors”) for companies like Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, Shipt, etc., and Amazon warehouse workers. They suffer from algorithmic wage discrimination, inconsistent hours, no benefits, and poor working conditions. Capitalists gonna capitalize. Without a counterbalancing labor power, it is only a matter of time until software engineers join the ranks of the precariat. AI could help us increase productivity and finally bring about the 15-hour work week and fully automated luxury gay space communism, but the road we’re on now will simply be used to line the pockets of some rich assholes and put the rest of us out of jobs without a social safety net, or worse: in precarious, low wage, dangerous, demeaning, shitty jobs.

The solution—as Ethan makes clear across five chapters and 141 pages—is to unionize. Forty years ago would have been ideal, but today is also good.

Highlights

Jump to section titled: Highlights

Inside of five short decades, the sewing machine is no longer discussed as a technology that will liberate its users. Instead, it delivers productivity.

A technology may promise liberation at first—but inevitably, people are captured by it.

Sharing that knowledge quite literally improves the entire community.

We've bought into this idea of the talented individualist so thoroughly that our stories tend to brush away all the privileges they enjoyed, or the assistance they received: the family that supported them, the wealth they inherited, the educational institutions they had access to. Somehow, our fables focus solely on the child, rather than on the village that raised them.

A union gives you options beyond simply leaving your job, or hoping it gets better, instead, it puts a mechanism in your hands that allows you and your fellow workers to help shape your job into something better.

“We recognize the superiority of democracy in every part of life except at work. And it's interesting how poorly this is appreciated: that organizations make better decisions when more people make decisions, not when fewer people make decisions.”

If your bosses decide to suit up for a battle against their own employees? Well. That seems like a pretty good indication that your union was needed in the first place.

[...] software alone can't displace workers—rather, it takes time, effort, and concerted investment from those who want to deskill workers.

We have to start organizing our workplaces today, at a scale that's unprecedented for our industry. And that organizing starts with you: with the union that you and your coworkers are forming.

[...] during the wave of layoffs in 2022 and 2023, the overwhelming majority of people who lost their jobs in the tech industry weren't designing or building digital products.

[...] all of us—all of us—work in a system that is actively trying to devalue our work.