Union Power Is Putting Pressure on Silicon Valley’s Tech Giants
Union Power Is Putting Pressure on Silicon Valley’s Tech
Giants
Organizers have unionized 5,000 contract workers at
Apple, Facebook, Yahoo!, and more.
By Josh Eidelson September 14, 2017, 3:00 AM PDT
Organized labor doesn’t rack up a lot of wins these days,
and Silicon Valley isn’t most people’s idea of a union hotbed. Nonetheless, in
the past three years unions have organized 5,000 people who work on Valley
campuses. Among others, they’ve unionized shuttle drivers at Apple, Tesla,
Twitter, LinkedIn, EBay, Salesforce.com, Yahoo!, Cisco, and Facebook; security
guards at Adobe, IBM, Cisco, and Facebook; and cafeteria workers at Cisco,
Intel, and, earlier this summer, Facebook.
The workers aren’t technically employed by any of those
companies. Like many businesses, Valley giants hire contractors that typically
offer much less in the way of pay and benefits than the tech companies’ direct
employees get. Among other things, such arrangements help companies distance
themselves from the way their cafeteria workers and security guards are
treated, because somebody else is cutting the checks. Silicon Valley Rising, a
coalition of unions and civil rights, community, and clergy groups heading the
organizing campaign, says its successes have come largely from puncturing that
veneer of plausible deniability.
That means directing political pressure, media scrutiny,
and protests toward the tech companies themselves. “Everybody knows that the
contractors will do what the tech companies say, so we’re focused on the big
guys,” says Ben Field, a co-founder of the coalition who heads the AFL-CIO’s
South Bay Labor Council. Labor leaders say their efforts have gotten some tech
companies to cut ties with an anti-union contractor, intervene with others to
ease unionization drives, and subsidize better pay for contract workers.
“If you want to get people to buy your product, you don’t
want them to feel that buying your product is contributing to the evils of the
world,” says Silicon Valley Rising co-founder Derecka Mehrens, who directs
Working Partnerships USA, a California nonprofit that advocates for workers.
Tech companies have been image-conscious and closely watched of late, she says,
and the coalition is “being opportunistic.”
The first such recent effort, in 2014, unionized 87
Facebook Inc. shuttle drivers employed by contractor Loop Transportation Inc.
“We won by beating up Facebook, not beating up Loop,” says California Teamster
leader Rome Aloise.
Initially, Loop resisted recognizing the union, citing
Facebook’s opposition, according to Aloise. So the Teamsters forced a vote by
the drivers that was supervised by the National Labor Relations Board (the
union won); union activists drew media attention to stories of Facebook shuttle
drivers sleeping in their cars between grueling split shifts. “We got press in
Japan and Germany and all over the world by saying Facebook,” Aloise says.
“Nobody would’ve given a shit if I was saying Loop.”
Eventually, Facebook says, it OK’d proposed terms of the
contract, which hiked drivers’ average pay by half, to $27.50 an hour, and for
the first time provided fully paid family health care. Facebook also agreed to
cover Loop’s added costs. Loop signed the contract. It didn’t respond to
requests for comment, but Facebook denies discouraging unionization. “Our
vendor workers are valued members of our community,” Facebook said in a
statement. A spokeswoman says collective bargaining is up to contractors and
their employees, but notes that since 2015, Facebook has required contractors
to provide anyone doing “a substantial amount of work” for the company an
hourly wage of at least $15 and
three weeks of paid time off.
When more than 500 cafeteria workers employed by Flagship
Facility Services sought this year to join the union Unite Here!, Facebook says
it didn’t direct Flagship’s handling of the situation. But it made clear to the
contractor that Facebook would be neutral toward the organizing campaign and
wouldn’t punish Flagship if the workers unionized, the spokeswoman says. Like
Facebook, Flagship took a neutral position, and the workers joined the union in
July.
Where possible, Silicon Valley Rising has pushed for
policies that would more broadly strengthen labor’s position. In San Francisco
the coalition persuaded the city transit authority to make it easier to deny
permits to companies facing labor strife. In Santa Clara, where Intel Corp.’s
unionized cafeteria staff had lost their jobs after the company brought in a
new nonunion contractor, the coalition led the passage of a municipal law
designed to avert such situations. The ordinance requires that new building
service or food service contractors retain the old contractor’s employees for
at least 90 days.
After protests outside Intel’s headquarters, the
cafeteria workers unionized again in an election last year. According to Unite
Here, Intel and its contractor didn’t campaign against the union in the lead-up
to the vote. Intel declined to comment.
The Valley campaign resembles a 1990s-era push by the
Service Employees International Union to organize tens of thousands of janitors
who were technically employed by building management companies. Apple Inc. was
a prime target—the campaign included a hunger strike, a boycott, and a
full-page ad in the New York Times—and workers there unionized after the
contractor dropped its opposition to the union, presumably with Apple’s
blessing. That offered a model for SEIU’s organizing of other tech janitors
and, more recently, the Valley’s security guards.
Tech companies are open to such outcomes partly because
contracted service staff represent a tiny share of their overall costs, says
former SEIU leader Stephen Lerner, who led the ’90s campaign. It’s much less
threatening to a company to have outside contractors unionize, he says, than it
would be to let, say, Facebook engineers do so. David Huerta, president of one
of SEIU’s California locals, says organizing among direct employees is a
longer-term possibility.
Union critics say tech companies will come to regret
intruding on contractors’ labor relations. “The fact that they have to browbeat
employers or subcontractors into taking away rights from workers shows that the
union business model is failing,” says F. Vincent Vernuccio, a fellow at
free-market think tank Mackinac Center for Public Policy who served on
President Trump’s transition team.
Leaders of Silicon Valley Rising say they’ll support any
workers who want to organize. Their near-term challenge is establishing a role
for organized labor in Google Inc.’s massive planned expansion in San Jose. The
city has voted to negotiate exclusively with Google on the sale of land for a
new campus, and organizers want any deal to include provisions addressing such
issues as affordable housing and the creation of quality jobs for local
residents. “We expect our contractors to treat their employees well and we
choose partners who do so,” Google spokesman Ty Sheppard said in an emailed
statement. “We’ll be collaborating closely with city officials and community
members as part of the public approval process.”
On Aug. 24, Silicon Valley Rising hosted a forum for San
Jose residents to air their concerns and demands. As English, Spanish, and
Vietnamese-speaking attendees broke into groups to brainstorm, an official from
the city manager’s office circulated through the crowd to listen. When the
crowd reconvened, Andrew Barney, a former Intel cafeteria worker, drew cheers
and applause when he said, “I think Google should pay the residents of this
community for being allowed to squat in our backyard.”
“Google’s vulnerable right now with all this building and
everything they’re doing, and they need a lot of approvals,” says the
Teamsters’ Aloise. “We may just pick one, one time, to get involved, and see if
we can stop it and have them come to us and say, ‘What do you need?’ ”
BOTTOM LINE - Silicon Valley Rising has unionized about
5,000 contract employees by working consistently to call out the tech companies
where they work.
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