Daily Reads
- Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, Harvard University
- Data & Society, as well as the newsletter from their “Future of Labor Initiative”
- “The Download”, a weekly mailer by the MIT Technology Review. We recommend the section “Must Reads” where they summarize all the best tech headlines, including labor.
- Action Center on Race and the Economy
- Progressive International
- Access Now and their mailer “Access Now Express”
- Center for Democracy & Technology
- Center for Ethics, Society, and Computing, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
- Harvard Women in Technology plus Allies
- Kara Swisher’s column in the New York Times
- Science for the People
- Bot Populi and DataSyn from IT for Change in New Delhi
Watch and Listen
Video Presentations by LaborTech Members
- Ifeoma Ajunwa gave a TEDx talk titled “Controversies of Ethics and Technology in Modern Workplaces”
- Luke Stark gave a talk titled “Facebook Abandons Facial Recognition. Should Everyone Else Follow Suit?”
- Christina Dunbar-Hester gave a book talk titled “Hacking Diversity? Collectivity, Critique, and Care in Open Technology Communities”
Documentaries and Films
- Organizing Digital Media, a video showing what’s behind the organizing wave in digital media, how workers organized their unions, and what they won by unionizing (thanks to member Nicole Cohen!)
- Labor History Documentary Series from Docuseek
Podcasts
Decolonize Your Lit Review: Guides on How to Unsettle Citations
- How to Cite Like a Badass Tech Feminist of Color by Rigoberto Lara Guzmán and Sareeta Amrute
- Cite Black Women Collective
- #CommunicationSoWhite by Paula Chakravartty, Rachel Kuo, Victoria Grubbs, and Charlton McIlwain
- Unlearning Caste Supremacy Reading List by Equality Labs
- A Primer on AI in/from the Majority World: An Empirical Site and a Standpoint by Sareeta Amrute, Ranjit Singh, and Rigoberto Lara Guzmán, which features a public Zotero library on AI in/from the majority world
Datasets and Archives
Use this Archive of Tech Labor Strikes, collected by members Nataliya Nedzhvetskaya and JS Tan:
The tech industry is rife with unfair treatment of workers of all stripes and the development of products harmful to our communities. The most effective path to address these issues is for workers to leverage their collective strength to push companies in the right direction. Collective Action in Tech started as a project to document collective actions in the technology industry and has evolved into a platform for workers to tell their stories, share resources, and theorize the tech workers movement together. We maintain an archive of several hundred collective actions by tech employees from 1969 to present-day, the largest database of its kind. Through experimentation and open-ended dialogue, we aim to create a space for tech workers to reflect on the movement’s past and to invent its future.
Website: https://collectiveaction.tech/
Archive Website: https://data.collectiveaction.tech/
Invitation to Contribute
We are actively seeking worker and researcher perspectives to share on our website. This can take a few different formats: Narrative accounts: Share your account as a tech worker, organizer, or researcher. Describe what motivated you to get involved in organizing, the obstacles you encountered along the way, and what you have learned from the experience. Interviews: Share your account in an interview format. A member of our team will conduct the interview. Photo or video essays: Do you have media from an organized action? Photo or video content can be an especially powerful medium for documenting collective action. Resources: What has helped you as an organizer? What has helped other organizers? Are there things you wish you’d known before you started organizing? A crucial part of building a community is sharing resources and knowledge. Your contribution will reach a broad audience of tech workers, organizers, and researchers from around the world.
We welcome anonymous contributions. We take extensive steps to validate our sources but recognize the very real risks that workers face when they speak out on these issues. We enthusiastically welcome contributions from the Global South. Have an idea for a contribution that doesn’t quite fit the above format? Have questions about this project in general? Reach out and we’d love to talk. Contact us at: collectiveactionintech[at]protonmail.com. For contributions, please write [Contribution] in the subject line and include a short pitch (50-200 words) describing how you’d like to contribute. More information can be found here.