News and Notes of Labor, Unionization, and Solidarity

Sega

May 1, 2023

Another Tech Industry Union?

It seems that Sega employees have filed for union election, with the NLRB. They will be known as AEGIS-CWA under the CWA umbrella. This is exciting to me, as a 40-something tech worker. All of my life I have grown and evolved in my career in software and have not seen labor evolve in similar fashions. I distinctly remember telling people, “I work in tech, we’re not unionized for some reason.”

Though I never saw the high salaries of the west-coast folks, I reckon there is some form of “marketing” that doesn’t allow solidarity and collection to enter the minds of the tech workers. We’re always treated as though we’re both “nerd heros” and “trash”; it’s a commonly known fact that management includes the fact that we are salary when completely blowing up schedules, deployments, and other “safety” mechanisms. We’re told it’s ok to do what we do, because it’s in our “core” - that is the hours, the Mt Dew, the “hack the planet” movies. (Sidebar: Ok, sorry to include the reference to Hackers…) Ask any software engineer if management really knows what a Gantt chart does.

Then again, in the past, I have been working on month 12 of a 3 month project and have said for many of these months that we need an actual “has teeth” project manager. There are a few that are worth their weight in gold. Though they are not management - which is where I for the most part got my ramble from, above.

Where was I? Oh, a union! I hope this spreads like wildfire!

Here is an article about it, over on The Verge.

Please go follow @takesAEGIS over on twitter, too!

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