Union Power Is Putting Pressure on Silicon Valley’s Tech Giants
Silicon Valley Rising, a coalition of unions and other community groups, has unionized over 5,000 employees working on Silicon Valley tech campuses in the last three years. Earlier this summer they successfully unionized cafeteria workers at Facebook, and not long before the coalition successfully organized cafeteria workers at Cisco and Intel, as well as shuttle drivers at Tesla, Apple, Twitter, LinkedIn, Yahoo!, EBay, Cisco, and Facebook, along with security guards at Adobe, IBM, Cisco and Facebook among others. In the past, Silicon Valley tech giants have been able to distance themselves from these workers because they technically are not employed by these companies, but instead hired through contractors that generally compensate their workers poorly in comparison to the companies’ direct employees. Silicon Valley Rising attributes the success of their unionizing drives to calling out the companies’ claims of plausible deniability using political pressure and the media to scrutinize how contract employees at these huge tech companies are treated.
See "Union Power Is Putting Pressure on Silicon Valley’s Tech Giants", Josh Eidelson, Bloomberg Businessweek, September 14, 2017