Excellent article published on August 31, 2021. Confirms all that is showed in the two French films about the way Facebook and other mega firms operate.
It's an article published in Vice by Lauren Kaori Gurley, titled "A new app is taking labor unions out of organizing".
Mentioned in the article: Unit ... with a team of 3 people (for now or maybe there also 'contractors"?) Lauren writes they "launched in December 2020 with $1.4 million in funding from various venture capital firm". It would be interesting to know a bit more about hose investors and where the money is going: it's a lot of money for such a small team (at this point).
Frank, based in Chicago, raised $2 million. 5 people (3 in technical jobs and no detail bio available)
Uniteonline provides zero info on their website.
Kim Lyons reports on July 23 in The Verge. No details yet about the paid leaves negotiated. Let us hope their story does not end like our did after the bargaining agreement was signed. The ratification vote is scheduled for July 30. I wonder how the PTO negotiated compares with Microsoft's requirements for their suppliers.
I found out just now the agreement was ratified today, July 29. See the USW press release. Here is the text of the agreement (PDF), provided by USW (Thank you). It looks like they got 15 days PTO, 12 paid holidays and 12 weeks of paid parental leave.
All our best wishes!
Microsoft's minimal requirements for PTO and paid parental leave:
April 2015, at least 15 days of PTO
August 2018, minimum of 12 weeks of paid parental leave
Initially it is a September 2019 French TV program Cash Investigation that you can see on Youtube. It lasts 2 hours and contains several interviews in English. The producers have adapted a 52 minutes feature film format available on Vimeo (I have not seen it) with the title Ghost Workers. The program focuses on the bike riders for ubereats, the content reviewers working for Facebook via Accenture, labelers working for Google via Figure Eight. The segment about the Figure Eight CEO, Lucas Biewald is amazing, as is the quest to interview the CEO of Facebook France, running away (on camera) from the journalist trying to interview him.
I have pointed where you can look for those segments in my notes below but I have not found the time to organize them better. Sorry. But this is worth seeing. It exposes the disgusting overexploitative side of AI and the millions made on the back of the ghost workers :(
Best documentary at the 2020 International Bangkok Documentaty Awards
Content workers for Facebook in Dublin sue FB. Have you heard about it?
Statement in English from the French director Henri Poulain
The first episode (about bike ubereats riders with English subtitles) where the pressure to deliver leads to accidents, sometimes fatal. When such a tragic accident happens, ubereats refuses to provide any information about the worker! see at 6 minutes.
Apparently the film is available via Vimeo (free 30 day trial and then you have to pay). Not sure how to get access :(
I am trying to find out how English speakers can see the whole film.
Surprise in the second episode here comes... Lionbridge! see at 1.50 minutes (sorry it's in French). The worker based in France works for Google but this has to remain a secret.
The film is originally a TV series in 4 episodes (mostly in French).
Wondering how Ben Gwin and his HCL co-workers are doing now? Is he still hopeful as in this interview? My concern is HCL will send the jobs to Poland or elsewhere, anyway and Google will not be impacted (nor HCL).
A very interesting initiative of the Tech Equity Collaborative, the Contract Worker Disparity Project. I wish they could research/monitor how things now are for Microsoft's suppliers employees. Without such persistent monitoring, double-checking, things could easily get worse or not better (as they should).
Written by Jane McAlevey for The Nation, "Blowout in Bessemer: a post mortem on the Amazon campaign". I was also told that on the 505 ballots that were "challenged", 400 were contested by Amazon (no explanation available yet if ever).
Still not sure how many pledge cards were submitted.
We can read the workers at Bessemer's Amazon plant said no to a union by a wide margin. If we look at the numbers, we are told there were 5.805 workers who received ballots to be mailed back: 3215 were returned so 2590 workers did not vote: that's 44,6% of the total workforce.
There were 1798 NO ballots counted (not including the 505 that were contested) that's 55% of the votes but only about 31% of the total workforce of 5.805 who were eligible to vote. The fact that 505 ballots were contested, supposedly mostly by Amazon, not the union, does not seem to concern many commentators, because even if they were all in favor of the union, it would not change the final result. Maybe so but why were so many ballots 'contested'? 15% of the votes contested, that's substantial. Who is going to give us a detailed explanation? Are we going to know wether they were NO or YES ballots?
Considering all that, I dont think it's accurate to say the workers said no to a union by a wide margin: 31% of the total workforce voted no, less than the 44% that did not vote. Last but not least, for the vote to take place, the workers had to sign pledge cards: it's not clear how many such pledge cards were submitted by the union and certified by NLRB. I read 2000 or 3000. Both numbers are higher than the number of No votes. Why did those pledges not translate two months after they were signed into more votes in favor of a union? What caused such an 'erosion'? The habitual answer is the negative impact of the intense anti-union propaganda produced by the employer (linked with the threat/fear of losing the job with the plant moving somewhere else). What's next?
