https://twitter.com/micsolana/status/1346142918600437760?s=19

Also checkout this tweet on what they said about coal miners

https://twitter.com/gabrielwinant/status/1346176034429923335?s=19

  • JayTwo [any]
    1·
    4 years ago

    Hot take question: If a union for cops doesn't count, why does a union for people working for a surveillance capitalist company that keeps buying out competitors and expanding?

    At what point, both in job description and pay, does someone working for the interests of the bourgeois, against those of the proletariat, become a class traitor, and not just another worker doing their job to survive?

    Or is it only cops who can be class traitors and we're just supposed to ignore the negative effects programmers for particularly exploitative companies like Google or Facebook, can have?

    • SnugMelon [he/him]
      ·
      4 years ago

      The problem with cop unions is that their members are cops, who do genuinely want to kill and harm people and make your life worse, and their unions reflect that by covering for them

      The hope is that a large tech union wouldn't defend the interests of their employers wrt surveillance, and instead push back against their employers to win public favor

      • JayTwo [any]
        ·
        4 years ago

        Google already has DoD and police contracts, and their entire current day business model is about tracking people's every movements to sell them shit they don't want.

        Some employees of Google may indeed be complicit in killing people, just not domestically. And their efforts are making our lives worse, it's just a bit opaque, because the effects of big data aren't always very apparent.

        The search engine part of alphabet isn't the main part anymore.

        Alphabet is already making the world a worse one, so any union that is okay with their employees' current jobs, and will just seek to earn them more money doing so, isn't really one I can get very excited about.

        I mean, good luck for them, I guess, but I'm not gonna join them on the picket lines.

        EDIT: Google does have police department contracts.

        I should also reiterate that I'm not against, just... ambivalent about the alphabet workers union. It really depends on how much they'll actually put their foot down regarding the reprehensible shit alphabet is already doing. I just don't see alphabet being able to exist in a semi ethical way, because their entire business model is currently centered around surveillance capitalism.

    • davidr4 [he/him]
      ·
      4 years ago

      Most complaints I hear about cop unions is that they stop cops being held accountable when they do cop shit. If police unions fought for higher wages or against mass layoffs the way other unions do, rather than trying to hide genuine misdeeds by employees, I'm sure leftists wouldn't be against them, at least not so vehemently.

      There's also the fact that the police are government controlled, so in theory they're already controlled democratically, making unions a little less necessary. Of course, for this to be true the US democracy would need to be functional and not so heavily influenced by capitalist media.