<
https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/27/some-animals/#are-more-equal-than-others>
'Tech workers are a weird choice for "princes of labor," but for decades
they've enjoyed unparalleled labor power, expressed in high wages, lavish stock
grants, and whimsical campuses with free laundry and dry-cleaning, gourmet
cafeterias, and kombucha on tap:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhUtdgVZ7MY
All of this, despite the fact that tech union density is so low it can barely
be charted. Tech workers' power didn't come from solidarity, it came from
scarcity. When you're getting five new recruiter emails every day, you don't
need a shop steward to tell your boss to go fuck themselves at the morning
scrum. You can do it yourself, secure in the knowledge that there's a company
across the road who'll give you a better job by lunchtime.
Tech bosses sucked up to their workers because tech workers are
insanely
productive. Even with sky-high salaries, every hour a tech worker puts in on
the job translates into massive profits. Which created a conundrum for tech
bosses: if tech workers produce incalculable value for the company every time
they touch their keyboards, and if there aren't enough tech workers to go
around, how do you get whichever tech workers you can hire to put in as many
hours as possible?
The answer is a tactic that Fobazi Ettarh called "vocational awe":
https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2018/vocational-awe/
"Vocational awe" describes the feeling that your work matters so much that you
should accept all manner of tradeoffs and calamities to get the job done.
Ettarh uses the term to describe the pathology of librarians, teachers, nurses
and other underpaid, easily exploited workers in "caring professions." Tech
workers are weird candidates for vocational awe, given how well-paid they are,
but never let it be said that tech bosses don't know how to innovate – they
successfully transposed an exploitation tactic from the most precarious
professionals to the
least precarious.'
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
