The Second-Class Office Workers

– The Wall Street Journal 

The Wall Street Journal contends that “millions of Americans now do jobs for companies that have replaced employees with outside workers who get lower pay and skimpy perks.” For Americans who work as contractors, real careers are out of reach and each day brings reminders that they live in a different world than the employees sitting nearby.

 

Meet the Millennial Who’s Trying to Save The Labor Movement with A Facebook For Unions

– Fast Company 

Frustrated at labor’s longtime slump, Larry Williams Jr. created UnionBase, which he’s positioning as both a social network for union members and an organizing vehicle for unions. UnionBase is just over a year old but already has 30,000 members and might transform labor’s engagement and organizing efforts.

 

Union Power Is Putting Pressure on Silicon Valley’s Tech Giants

– Bloomberg

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.
There’s Blood in The Water in Silicon Valley

– Buzzfeed News 

From Buzzfeed News: “The blinding rise of Donald Trump over the past year has masked another major trend in American politics: the palpable, and perhaps permanent, turn against the tech industry. The new corporate leviathans that used to be seen as bright new avatars of American innovation are increasingly portrayed as sinister new centers of unaccountable power, a transformation likely to have major consequences for the industry and for American politics.”