Toward Realignment: Big Tech, Organized Labor, and the Politics of the Future of Work

Abstract

A future that revalues workers will require not only revitalizing the U.S. labor movement but realigning its political alliances and, specifically, eschewing compromises that further entrench big tech as a center of neoliberal power. During the twentieth century, the Democratic Party incorporated organized labor by linking the micropolitics of capitalist shopfloor control to a macropolitics of industrial growth and full employment. This framework of political incorporation foreclosed the wider class solidarity needed for expanding the reach of the labor movement and, eventually, for maintaining its relevance altogether. As the Democratic Party turned to cultivating a new base in finance, tech, and their elite workforces, the unions of the new economy, based largely in the service sector, made limited gains amid an ongoing bipartisan retrenchment of the industrial welfare state. In recent years, neoliberal hegemony has begun to be challenged, and nascent organizing among Amazon warehouse workers, Uber and Lyft drivers, and other frontline tech workers holds the potential for restoring the fortunes of labor. For parts of the labor officialdom, this moment is an opportunity to revive the old incorporation modelin exchange for ceding the right to contest algorithmic control and employment status. I see this strategy as not only reinforcing insecure work but preempting the formation of coalitions that can tackle the vast societal issues exacerbated by algorithmic control, from police surveillance and military expansion to housing insecurity and climate change. In this piece, I call for a political realignment that centers the agency of the working class in contesting the influence of big tech on and off the shopfloor, rather than serving as its junior partner. My case has four parts. I begin by sketching the limits of contemporary labor experimentation in the United States. Second, I review how Revaluing Work(ers) clarifies normative questions in debates about the future of work, while third, I discuss the political stakes of these questions through a critique of