Code Red

Cases of Modelo sit on a rickety wooden table near the elevator, two laptops open to a Google sign-in sheet beside them.

电梯附近一张摇摇晃晃的木桌上放着一箱箱莫德洛，两台笔记本电脑打开，旁边有一张谷歌登录表。

A few people mill around the table, welcoming newcomers.

几个人围着桌子转来转去，欢迎新人。

I enter my contact information on one of the laptops, take a half-sheet printout of the meeting’s agenda, and find a seat.

我在一台笔记本电脑上输入联系信息，打印半张会议议程，然后找到座位。

We’re in a start-up office in an unexceptional high rise in Manhattan.

我们在曼哈顿一栋不起眼的高层建筑中的一间初创办公室里。

There is little furniture to speak of: dozens of black rolling chairs assembled in a haphazard circle, whose occupants scoot to make space for the people trickling in.

几乎没有什么家具可言：几十张黑色的滚椅随意地围成一圈，里面的人快速移动，为慢慢进来的人腾出空间。

There are fifty-two people here, more than the organizers expected.

这里有五十二人，超出了组织者的预期。

Latecomers stand outside the circle, leaning against the bare columns scattered throughout the room.

迟到者站在圆圈外，靠在散落在房间各处的光秃秃的柱子上。

It is mid-July of 2017, and this is the first official meeting of Tech Action, a working group of the New York City local of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).

时间是2017年7月中旬，这是美国民主社会主义者（DSA）纽约市地方工作组Tech Action的第一次正式会议。

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“Raise your hand if this is your first DSA meeting,” says Fred, 2 a mild-mannered, thirtysomething software engineer in financial technologies, or “fintech,” and one of the men (it’s mostly men) leading the meeting.

“如果这是您第一次参加 DSA 会议，请举手，”Fred 说，2 是一位举止温和的 30 多岁金融技术（或“金融科技”）软件工程师，也是主持会议的男性之一（大多数是男性）。

Five hands go up.

五只手举起来。

“Raise your hand if you work in the tech industry,” Fred continues.

“如果你在科技行业工作，请举手，”弗雷德继续说道。

Almost every hand in the room goes up.

房间里几乎每个人都举起了手。

A few years ago, a room full of techies — ​shorthand for white-collar tech employees, usually software engineers or computer programmers — gathered to organize their industry was unthinkable.

几年前，一屋子技术人员（白领技术员工的简称，通常是软件工程师或计算机程序员）聚集在一起组织他们的行业是不可想象的。

Press coverage of the industry was boosterish and sedulously uninvestigative, as journalists tended to embrace Google’s old “Don’t be evil” motto as a factual description of its aims.

媒体对该行业的报道充满了鼓吹性，并且刻意不进行调查，因为记者们倾向于接受谷歌古老的“不作恶”座右铭作为对其目标的事实描述。

After all, tech was our path to utopia — it would “connect” us, reduce our environmental footprint by eliminating all paper and books, and free us from the tyranny of work by replacing us with robots.

毕竟，科技是我们通往乌托邦的道路——它将“连接”我们，通过消除所有纸张和书籍来减少我们的环境足迹，并通过用机器人取代我们来将我们从工作的暴政中解放出来。

But the gap between tech theory and tech practice has grown increasingly difficult to ignore.

但技术理论与技术实践之间的差距变得越来越难以忽视。

Even the tech press — Wired and its ilk — has lost faith.

就连科技媒体——《连线》及其同类——也失去了信心。

Many now know the tech elite as a hive of misogynists and sociopaths, and their companies to be indiscriminate vacuums of sensitive personal data that they package and sell to the nation’s intelligence agencies (and the Trump campaign).

现在，许多人都知道科技精英是厌恶女性主义者和反社会者的聚集地，他们的公司是敏感个人数据的不加区别的真空，他们将这些数据打包并出售给国家情报机构（和特朗普竞选团队）。

According to polls, the majority of the public still maintains a positive view of the industry’s biggest companies.

根据民意调查，大多数公众仍然对该行业最大的公司保持积极看法。

But the scales have fallen from the eyes of many of its workers.

但许多工人眼中的天平已经落下。

After Fred introduces himself to the meeting’s attendees, members of Tech Solidarity and the Tech Workers Coalition (TWC), two leading grassroots tech organizations, give reports on their recent activity.

在 Fred 向与会者介绍自己后，两个领先的草根科技组织 Tech Solidarity 和 Tech Workers Coalition (TWC) 的成员就他们最近的活动进行了报告。

Tech Solidarity was created by Maciej Cegłowski, the founder of Pinboard, a social-bookmarking website.

Tech Solidarity 由社交书签网站 Pinboard 的创始人 Maciej Cegłowski 创建。

Following Donald Trump’s election, Cegłowski and Heather Gold, a Bay Area comedian, put out a call for techies to meet up in San Francisco.

唐纳德·特朗普当选后，切格洛夫斯基和湾区喜剧演员希瑟·戈尔德呼吁技术人员在旧金山聚会。

They wanted to talk with other people about how to act on their discontent.

他们想与其他人讨论如何应对他们的不满。

More than a hundred people attended the first meeting.

第一次会议就有一百多人参加。

Soon Cegłowski was flying to other US cities to host Tech Solidarity gatherings.

很快，切格洛夫斯基飞往美国其他城市举办科技团结聚会。

Compared with Tech Solidarity, TWC may be, as Moira Weigel calls them in a recent piece for the Guardian , “the most radical Tech Left group.” Created by Matt Schaefer, an engineer, and Rachel Melendes, a cafeteria worker and organizer, the group began meeting in 2014 and saw an explosion of interest after Trump’s election.

正如莫伊拉·韦格尔 (Moira Weigel) 在《卫报》最近发表的一篇文章中所说，与科技团结组织相比，TWC 可能是“最激进的科技左派团体”。该组织由工程师 Matt Schaefer 和自助餐厅工作人员兼组织者 Rachel Melendes 创建，于 2014 年开始聚会，并在特朗普当选后引起了人们的兴趣激增。

Focused on building a coalition of blue-collar and white-collar tech workers, TWC devotes the bulk of its efforts to supporting union campaigns among the low-wage workers who are increasingly employed through third-party contractors, a practice that allows tech companies to avoid directly employing the legions of custodians, cafeteria workers, and security guards that sustain their sprawling campuses.

TWC 专注于建立蓝领和白领科技工人联盟，并将大部分精力用于支持越来越多地通过第三方承包商雇用的低工资工人的工会运动，这种做法使科技公司能够避免直接雇用维持其庞大园区的大量管理员、自助餐厅工人和保安人员。

TWC’s coalition work has the potential to reshape the tech industry from the inside out: not just how people work in it, but what it creates and does.

TWC 的联盟工作有可能从内到外重塑科技行业：不仅是人们如何在其中工作，还包括它创造的内容和所做的事情。

Hostility to unions has been foundational to the tech industry.

对工会的敌意一直是科技行业的基础。

In its idealized self-image, tech is a meritocracy governed by speed, efficiency, and competition, in which companies can acquire and shed workers as needed.

在其理想化的自我形象中，科技是一个受速度、效率和竞争支配的精英统治，公司可以根据需要招募和解雇员工。

Insecurity is a value.

不安全感是一种价值观。

There is freedom in hopping from job to job, and the idea that someone might want to remain anywhere for long is unthinkable.

人们可以自由地从一个工作跳到另一个工作，而有人想长期留在某个地方的想法是不可想象的。

By making it difficult to fire employees and limiting other arbitrary company decisions, unions (supposedly) make labor markets less fluid.

通过加大解雇员工的难度并限制公司其他任意决策，工会（据称）会降低劳动力市场的流动性。

They are dinosaurs, and the tech industry is an asteroid.

他们是恐龙，而科技行业是一颗小行星。

In the 1960s, an increasing number of low-slung boxy offices replaced the oaks and orange groves of the southern San Francisco Bay Area, making what would become Silicon Valley.

20 世纪 60 年代，越来越多的低矮四四方方的办公室取代了旧金山湾区南部的橡树和橘子林，形成了后来的硅谷。

Around this time, Robert Noyce, the cofounder of Intel, asserted that “remaining non-union is essential for survival for most of our companies.

大约在这个时候，英特尔联合创始人罗伯特·诺伊斯断言，“保持不加入工会对于我们大多数公司的生存至关重要。

If we had the work rules that unionized companies have, we’d all go out of business.” Emphasizing the industry’s need to retain “flexibility,” Noyce’s ethos held even as Intel and the industry at large expanded beyond the production of microchips.

如果我们有工会公司那样的工作规则，我们都会倒闭。”诺伊斯强调行业需要保持“灵活性”，即使英特尔和整个行业的业务扩展到微芯片生产之外，诺伊斯的精神仍然保持不变。

Escaping East Coast unions had been a major reason behind tech companies’ settling in California to begin with.

逃离东海岸工会是科技公司落户加州的主要原因。

As AnnaLee Saxenian writes in her book Regional Advantage , Silicon Valley overtook Route 128, the tech corridor just outside of Boston, as the industry’s main hub in part because it could take advantage of looser labor markets.

正如 AnnaLee Saxenian 在她的《区域优势》一书中所写，硅谷取代了波士顿郊外的科技走廊 128 号公路，成为该行业的主要枢纽，部分原因是它可以利用宽松的劳动力市场。

In a 1983 profile of Noyce, Tom Wolfe wrote, “Noyce disliked many things ‘back east’”:

汤姆·沃尔夫 (Tom Wolfe) 在 1983 年对诺伊斯的简介中写道，“诺伊斯不喜欢‘东方’的很多东西”：

Labor-management battles were part of the ancient terrain of the East .

劳资斗争是东方古老地形的一部分。

If Intel were divided into workers and bosses, with the implication that each side had to squeeze its money out of the hides of the other, the enterprise would be finished.

如果英特尔被分为工人和老板，这意味着每一方都必须从对方的皮里榨取钱，那么这家企业就会完蛋。

Motivation would no longer be internal; it would be objectified in the deadly form of work rules and grievance procedures.

动机将不再是内在的；它将以致命的工作规则和申诉程序的形式具体化。

Nonetheless, tech employees have tried to unionize since the industry’s earliest years.

尽管如此，自该行业成立之初起，科技员工就一直试图成立工会。

Wolfe mentions several attempts to organize Intel in the late ’60s and early ’70s — campaigns Noyce viewed as a “death threat” to the company.

沃尔夫提到了 60 年代末和 70 年代初组织英特尔的几次尝试，诺伊斯将这些活动视为对公司的“死亡威胁”。

The lead author of a 1976 article in Science for the People titled “Rumblings of Organizing in Silicon Valley” writes of his experience in a “unionization drive among the chemists, physicists, engineers, and technicians” of the Smith-Corona Marchant (S.C.M.) Corporation, once famous for its typewriters.

1976 年，《Science for the People》上发表了一篇题为“硅谷组织的谣言”的文章，该文章的主要作者描述了他在曾因打字机而闻名的 Smith-Corona Marchant (S.C.M.) 公司“化学家、物理学家、工程师和技术人员之间的工会运动”中的经历。

As the author recounts, intense workplace pressure jump-started the campaign:

正如作者所叙述的那样，巨大的工作压力推动了这场运动：

The company maintained an artificial crisis atmosphere by claiming severe urgency for almost every project .

该公司通过声称几乎每个项目都非常紧迫来维持人为的危机气氛。

By implying a loss of job or status, the management was able to get large amounts of free overtime (“remember, you are a professional ”), and justify almost constant harassment .

通过暗示失去工作或地位，管理层能够获得大量免费加班（“记住，你是专业人士”），并为几乎持续不断的骚扰辩护。

Two fatal heart attacks of workers in their early forties occurred within one year in this small facility alone, and there were several other nonfatal attacks as well.

仅在这个小工厂一年内就发生了两起四十岁出头工人的致命心脏病发作，此外还发生了几起非致命性心脏病发作。

Though the company defeated the campaign, similar organizing drives popped up less than a decade later, as employees at Atari fought wage cuts and layoffs in the early 1980s.

尽管该公司击败了这场运动，但不到十年后，随着雅达利员工在 20 世纪 80 年代初反对减薪和裁员，类似的组织活动又出现了。

After all, despite tech executives’ insistence that their industry is incompatible with unions, labor organizing among scientists is common enough.

毕竟，尽管科技高管坚称他们的行业与工会不相容，但科学家之间的劳工组织却很常见。

Take the Society of Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace, a union that represents more than 22,650 professionals, or the faculty and graduate-student unions that represent many white-collar professionals, many of whom go on to work in tech.

以航空航天专业工程员工协会为例，该工会代表超过 22,650 名专业人士，或者代表许多白领专业人士的教师和研究生工会，其中许多人继续从事科技工作。

Add the Alliance@IBM, a union of dues-paying IBM employees that existed from 1999 to 2016; WashTech, formed by contract workers at Microsoft; the union-like Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, which boasts a worldwide membership of more than 423,000, mostly made up of electrical engineers; and the Programmer’s Guild, which “advances the interests of technical and professional workers” in IT.

添加 Alliance@IBM，这是一个由 1999 年至 2016 年存在的缴纳会费的 IBM 员工组成的工会； WashTech，由微软合同工组建；类似联盟的电气和电子工程师协会，在全球拥有超过 423,000 名会员，其中大部分是电气工程师；程序员协会“促进 IT 领域技术和专业工作者的利益”。

Taken together, these organizations make the anti-union fortress of tech begin to look less impregnable.

总而言之，这些组织使得反工会的科技堡垒开始显得不再那么坚不可摧。

Union campaigns in tech companies have scored some notable victories in recent months.

近几个月来，科技公司的工会运动取得了一些显着的胜利。

In January 2017, three thousand security guards on Silicon Valley campuses like Cisco, Facebook, and Genentech won union recognition.

2017年1月，思科、Facebook、基因泰克等硅谷园区的三千名保安获得了工会认可。

Last summer, cafeteria workers on Facebook’s campus — assisted in small part by TWC, which includes Facebook engineers — voted to unionize with UNITE HERE, following Facebook’s shuttle drivers who voted to join the Teamsters in 2015.

去年夏天，继 2015 年 Facebook 班车司机投票加入卡车司机工会之后，Facebook 园区的自助餐厅工作人员（在 TWC（其中包括 Facebook 工程师）的一小部分协助下）投票加入了 UNITE HERE 工会。

The cafeteria workers are employed by Flagship Facility Services, a contractor, but they used their proximity to the image-conscious Facebook to pressure Flagship not to fight the union.

自助餐厅的工作人员受雇于承包商 Flagship Facility Services，但他们利用与注重形象的 Facebook 的密切关系向 Flagship 施压，要求其不要与工会作对。

Eric Murphy, a security guard employed by Allied Universal on Facebook’s campus, told me that while some techies expressed support for the campaign, the physical segregation of techies and contractors hindered solidarity.

埃里克·墨菲 (Eric Murphy) 是 Facebook 园区 Allied Universal 的一名保安，他告诉我，虽然一些技术人员表示支持这项活动，但技术人员和承包商之间的物理隔离阻碍了团结。

The UNITE HERE local that Flagship’s workers joined now represents cafeteria workers at Agilent, Cisco, Intel, and Nvidia, all Bay Area tech companies.

Flagship 员工加入的 UNITE HERE 当地组织现在代表安捷伦、思科、英特尔和英伟达等湾区科技公司的自助餐厅员工。

There are now approximately five thousand unionized workers on Silicon Valley campuses.

目前，硅谷园区内约有五千名工会工人。

Tech Solidarity and TWC fall somewhere between workers’ centers and community organizations.

Tech Solidarity 和 TWC 介于工人中心和社区组织之间。

Tech Solidarity asks techies to bring in their contracts, so labor lawyers can analyze industry standards and assist in workplace organizing campaigns.

技术团结组织要求技术人员提交合同，以便劳动律师可以分析行业标准并协助工作场所组织活动。

Cegłowski himself has come to focus on electoral politics, particularly the 2018 midterms and fundraising for progressive candidates.

切格洛夫斯基本人开始关注选举政治，特别是 2018 年中期选举和进步候选人的筹款活动。

TWC is less interested in electoral politics, focusing instead on the working environment of blue-collar workers on tech campuses.

TWC 对选举政治不太感兴趣，而是关注科技园区蓝领工人的工作环境。

When security guards at Facebook began to unionize, the group was well positioned to help.

当 Facebook 的保安开始组建工会时，该组织完全可以提供帮助。

As Kristen Sheets, a Bay Area–based technical analyst and TWC steering committee member told me, Facebook employees who were members of TWC distributed information to security guards about the campaign when union organizers were not allowed on campus.

正如湾区技术分析师兼 TWC 指导委员会成员 Kristen Sheets 告诉我的那样，当工会组织者不被允许进入校园时，身为 TWC 成员的 Facebook 员工向保安人员分发了有关该活动的信息。

TWC also helped organize protests outside Palantir after Trump’s election to pressure the data-mining company not to build the administration’s planned Muslim registry.

特朗普当选后，TWC 还帮助组织 Palantir 外的抗议活动，向这家数据挖掘公司施压，要求其不要建立政府计划中的穆斯林登记处。

Neither TWC nor Tech Solidarity is a union.

TWC 和 Tech Solidarity 都不是工会。

The potential power of a true tech union would be enormous.

真正的科技联盟的潜在力量将是巨大的。

Techies may not sweat it out in a warehouse, haul cargo at a port, or fix cars on an assembly line, but they occupy a critical point in their company’s operations.

技术人员可能不会在仓库里辛苦工作，在港口拖运货物，或者在装配线上修理汽车，但他们在公司运营中占据着关键地位。

Cary, a web developer at a marketing firm, explained to me how techies can create strategic interruptions in the system.

卡里是一家营销公司的网络开发人员，他向我解释了技术人员如何在系统中制造战略中断。

Because “management often doesn’t have specific programming knowledge,” he said, “it’s possible to monkey-wrench and slow things down in more complicated pieces of code.”

他说，因为“管理层通常不具备特定的编程知识，因此可能会在更复杂的代码片段中搞砸并减慢速度。”

Jason, a software engineer in a Boston-based company, told me that “because tech products have been cobbled together over the course of years, the learning curve to run a specific one is incredibly steep, unless someone can teach you about the quirks.” And while a digital picket line wouldn’t be centralized in any physical sense, the symbolic barrier could be made visible to the product’s users.

杰森是波士顿一家公司的软件工程师，他告诉我，“由于科技产品是经过多年拼凑而成的，运行特定产品的学习曲线非常陡峭，除非有人能教你这些怪癖。”虽然数字纠察线在任何物理意义上都不会集中，但象征性的障碍可以对产品的用户可见。

“If the developers from Slack decided to strike,” Jason offered, “they could without too much difficulty push out a change that made it so that any message that got sent would push a message about the purpose of the strike [to the user].”

Jason 表示：“如果 Slack 的开发人员决定罢工，他们可以毫不费力地推出一项更改，以便发送的任何消息都会向用户推送有关罢工目的的消息。”

Techies operate in a tight labor market, one with more job openings than it can fill.

技术人员在紧张的劳动力市场中工作，该市场的职位空缺超出了其所能填补的范围。

Many tech jobs require highly skilled workers and months of on-the-job training.

许多技术工作需要高技能的工人和数月的在职培训。

The extent to which tech CEOs worry about the power workers hold in this arrangement was revealed in 2013.

2013 年，科技公司首席执行官们对员工在这种安排中所拥有的权力的担忧程度就已暴露出来。

A class-action lawsuit was filed on behalf of more than one hundred thousand tech employees against Adobe, Apple, Google, and Intel for conspiring to suppress wages by creating “no-poach” lists, an agreement among the companies not to recruit each other’s engineers.

代表超过十万名科技员工对 Adobe、苹果、谷歌和英特尔提起集体诉讼，指控他们合谋通过制定“禁止挖角”名单来压低工资，“禁止挖角”名单是各公司之间达成的一项互不招聘工程师的协议。

The lawsuit, based on a Department of Justice antitrust investigation launched in 2010, resulted in a $415 million settlement.

该诉讼以司法部 2010 年启动的反垄断调查为基础，最终达成 4.15 亿美元的和解协议。

“It’s not hard to find a coder,” Fred told me.

“找到一名程序员并不难，”弗雷德告诉我。

“There’s a shitload of coders.

“有一大群程序员。

But when you’re at an elite tech firm, they have an understanding of what an elite, skilled worker is — some of which is not legitimate, some of which is — [and] the engineers are understood to be very highly skilled and not easy to replace.

但当你在一家精英科技公司工作时，他们了解什么是精英、技术工人——其中有些是不合法的，有些是合法的——[而且]工程师被认为技能非常高，不容易被取代。

Which gives [workers] a lot of power, and a lot of cover if we’re doing anything political.”

这给了[工人]很大的权力，如果我们做任何政治事情，也会有很多掩护。”

Why would tech workers organize?

科技工作者为什么要组织起来？

They’re not poor.

他们并不穷。

They have a relative amount of power in their industry.

他们在自己的行业中拥有相对的权力。

But even the most well-paid tech job can have grueling hours, which is why tech workers are lauded for spending nights at their desks and punished for having children.

但即使是薪酬最高的科技工作也可能工作很辛苦，这就是为什么科技工作者因在办公桌前过夜而受到赞扬，却因为生孩子而受到惩罚。

Tech is also not known as especially welcoming to people of color.

科技也并不特别受有色人种欢迎。

Michelle Miller, cofounder of Coworker.org, a platform that helps workers organize, explained that it’s no longer so unusual to find a room full of techies who want to organize at work.

帮助员工组织起来的平台 Coworker.org 的联合创始人米歇尔·米勒 (Michelle Miller) 解释说，发现一屋子都是想要在工作中组织起来的技术人员已不再是罕见的事情。

“We’ve had people from every major tech company you can think of contact us in the past year saying, ‘I want to organize a union.’”

“过去一年里，你能想到的各大科技公司的人都联系我们说，‘我想组织一个工会。’”

Miller and her cofounder, Jess Kutch, were working for Service Employees International Union when they decided to create a digital platform to help workers organize in 2013.

2013 年，米勒和她的联合创始人杰西·卡奇 (Jess Kutch) 决定创建一个数字平台来帮助工人组织起来，当时他们正在为服务业雇员国际联盟工作。

“There wasn’t a bridge between what was happening in so many people’s nonunionized workplaces and what was happening in the labor movement,” said Miller.

米勒说：“这么多人的非工会工作场所所发生的事情与劳工运动中所发生的事情之间没有桥梁。”

She and Kutch wanted to share their organizing knowledge, but unions, hobbled by waves of anti-union legislation and strapped for funds as their dues-paying bases diminished, couldn’t provide the means.

她和卡奇想分享他们的组织知识，但工会因一波又一波的反工会立法而陷入困境，并且由于会费基础减少而资金短缺，无法提供手段。

Coworker.org has since been used to create in-app tips for Uber drivers, increase staffing at Starbucks, and fight sexual harassment at Comcast.

此后，Coworker.org 被用来为 Uber 司机创建应用内提示、增加星巴克的员工人数以及打击康卡斯特的性骚扰。

But Miller says that until last year, the idea of organizing tech workers was not on their radar.

但米勒表示，直到去年，他们才考虑组织科技工作者的想法。

Tech is filled with well-meaning people, but it took Trump’s election for many of them to realize that even if they identify as liberal or left (tech companies were four of the top five employers of Sanders campaign donors), their companies do not.

科技行业充满了善意的人，但特朗普当选后，他们中的许多人意识到，即使他们自认为是自由派或左派（科技公司是桑德斯竞选捐款人前五名雇主中的四家），他们的公司却并非如此。

Tech companies often tout their internal feedback systems as more effective and flexible than union grievance procedures.

科技公司经常宣称其内部反馈系统比工会申诉程序更有效、更灵活。

Once she began to work with techies, Miller said, employees who’d previously told her they didn’t need tools like Coworker.org returned with stories of frustration.

米勒说，一旦她开始与技术人员合作，之前告诉她不需要 Coworker.org 等工具的员工就会带着沮丧的故事回来。

“They’ve discovered that when you push your company on things that impact their bottom line or the power they have in the economy, or impact their monopoly over data, they stop listening to you,” said Miller.

米勒说：“他们发现，当你迫使公司做一些影响他们的底线或他们在经济中的权力，或者影响他们对数据的垄断的事情时，他们就会不再听你的。”

“Their gentle, friendly systems for employees’ voices stop working.”

“他们温和、友好的员工声音系统不再起作用。”

But trust really began to erode over more ideological issues.

但由于更多的意识形态问题，信任确实开始受到侵蚀。

For many of the tech giants, internal feedback systems center on weekly all-hands meetings in which employees use Reddit-like platforms to up-vote or down-vote topics submitted before the meetings, which are then addressed by high-ranking executives.

对于许多科技巨头来说，内部反馈系统以每周一次的全体会议为中心，员工在会上使用类似 Reddit 的平台对会议前提交的主题进行投票，然后由高级管理人员进行讨论。

These systems are limited, especially when it comes to matters of politics.

这些系统是有限的，尤其是在涉及政治问题时。

Miller explained that the James Damore memo revealed to some techies that “the alt-right contingents inside these companies have been organizing to game those systems, to ‘thumbs down’ important issues that people wanted to talk about.” To them, Damore’s memo revealed an organized effort by right-wing employees to suppress open discussions of misogyny in tech.

米勒解释说，詹姆斯·达莫尔的备忘录向一些技术人员透露，“这些公司内部的另类右翼队伍一直在组织起来玩弄这些系统，‘拒绝’人们想要谈论的重要问题。”对他们来说，达莫尔的备忘录揭示了右翼员工有组织地压制科技领域厌女症的公开讨论。

Google’s response to the Damore memo infuriated more than a few employees.

谷歌对达莫尔备忘录的回应激怒了多名员工。

Googlers — as the company’s white-collar employees are called — say the company “was on fire for a week before the memo broke publicly,” with conversation about the “women-are-dumber-than-men memo” (as one female engineer put it) pervading the company’s otherwise apolitical offices.

谷歌员工（公司白领员工的称呼）表示，该公司“在该备忘录公开之前已经火了一周”，有关“女性比男性笨”（正如一位女工程师所说）的讨论遍布该公司原本不关心政治的办公室。

Google scheduled a company-wide town hall devoted to the topic within days of the memo’s publication, but canceled it for reasons having to do with “the safety of employees.” Their stated cause for concern came from Googlers leaking the names and writings of colleagues upset by the memo “directly to the alt-right.” Far-right blogs still display these leaks.

备忘录发布后几天内，谷歌安排了一次全公司范围的市政厅专门讨论这个话题，但由于与“员工安全”有关的原因而取消了。他们声称的担忧原因是谷歌员工“直接向另类右翼”泄露了对这份备忘录感到不满的同事的姓名和著作。极右翼博客仍然展示这些泄密事件。

Aside from a statement from the company’s VP of diversity, “there hasn’t been an official communication about the memo since that town hall was canceled,” said Jake, a software engineer at Google, which suggests that the company remains ill-equipped to handle difficult workplace issues.

谷歌软件工程师杰克说，除了公司多元化副总裁的一份声明外，“自从市政厅取消以来，还没有关于这份备忘录的正式沟通”，这表明该公司仍然没有能力处理棘手的工作场所问题。

Faced with the Damores of the business and their alt-right allies, the left-leaning techies recognized their relative weakness.

面对企业界的达莫尔及其另类右翼盟友，左倾技术人员认识到了自己的相对弱点。

As they saw “how their internal platforms were being used against them, and were neither perfect nor optimized for good,” said Miller, they began to suspect that if their executives couldn’t address problems of racism or misogyny within the workplace, they were unlikely to do so in public, “where there are profits at risk.”

米勒说，当他们看到“他们的内部平台如何被用来对付他们，而且既不完美，也不是为了好的目的而优化”时，他们开始怀疑，如果他们的高管不能解决工作场所内的种族主义或厌女症问题，他们就不太可能在公开场合这样做，“因为那里的利润面临风险”。

Similarly, Miller described a group of workers at a social platform who “had been raising issues about the use of the platform to disseminate hate and [to] attack people for months and months and months, but all the processes that had been set up [to address them] .

同样，米勒描述了社交平台上的一群工作人员，他们“几个月来一直在提出有关使用该平台传播仇恨和攻击他人的问题，但已经建立的所有流程都是为了解决这些问题。”

.

。

.

。

deliberately led to dead ends” or made the problem “impossible to solve.” The workers were frustrated, Miller said, and “it eroded their trust in the company, making them feel that they were part of the problem and couldn’t do anything about it.”

故意导致死胡同”或使问题“无法解决”。米勒说，工人们感到沮丧，“这削弱了他们对公司的信任，让他们觉得自己是问题的一部分，而且对此无能为力。”

Alex, another techie, knows the feeling.

另一位技术人员亚历克斯（Alex）知道这种感觉。

Before he became a systems operator at an ad-tech firm, he worked for Securus, which describes itself as a provider of “leading edge civil and criminal justice technology solutions”; Alex described it as “Skype for prisoners.” He has worked in the tech sector for twelve years and only lasted a few months at Securus.

在成为一家广告技术公司的系统操作员之前，他曾在 Securus 工作，该公司将自己描述为“领先的民事和刑事司法技术解决方案”的提供商；亚历克斯将其描述为“囚犯专用的 Skype”。他在科技领域工作了 12 年，但只在 Securus 工作了几个月。

He recounted his time there:

他回忆起在那里的时光：

There were discussions about how US policy on prison reform was going to affect our bottom line.

人们讨论了美国的监狱改革政策将如何影响我们的利润。

Meetings were held as company-wide conference calls: the CFO would say, “Excellent news, we can raise the rates on our product without Justice Department interference.” They would have projections on the recidivism rate and that if it’ll remain high, we’ll expect a great year.

会议以全公司电话会议的形式举行：首席财务官会说，“好消息，我们可以在不受司法部干预的情况下提高产品的费率。”他们将对累犯率进行预测，如果累犯率保持在高位，我们将期待今年的好年景。

The thinking within the company about prisoners was, “You fucked up .

公司内部对囚犯的看法是：“你搞砸了……”

If you didn’t want to be exploited by our company, you shouldn’t have gone to jail; we have no moral qualms about mining you for whatever you’re worth.” I couldn’t sleep, so I had to leave.

如果你不想被我们公司剥削，你就不应该进监狱；我们不会因为你的价值而挖掘你的道德疑虑。”我睡不着，所以我必须离开。

Alex isn’t the only techie struggling with the glaring contradictions of an industry that claims to make the world a better place.

亚历克斯并不是唯一一个在这个声称让世界变得更美好的行业中与明显矛盾作斗争的技术人员。

“At my last company, we did email marketing,” Markus, a systems administrator at a social media management company, told me.

“在我上一家公司，我们做电子邮件营销，”一家社交媒体管理公司的系统管理员马库斯告诉我。

While performing routine maintenance, he discovered that some of the company’s customers were “not just conservatives, but Breitbartesque, right-wing propagandists.” After talking to colleagues about his discovery, he asked the CEO to cancel the contract.

在进行日常维护时，他发现该公司的一些客户“不仅是保守派，而且还是布莱特巴特式的右翼宣传家”。在与同事谈论他的发现后，他要求首席执行官取消合同。

“The CEO said we can’t discriminate based on ideological beliefs.” But Markus and his colleagues organized an after-work meeting to discuss next steps to pressure the company.

“首席执行官说我们不能基于意识形态信仰进行歧视。”但马库斯和他的同事组织了一次下班后会议，讨论下一步向公司施压的步骤。

“We met at a bar, fifteen to thirty of us in a company of one hundred employees, and decided to raise this through our company’s internal feedback channel.

“我们在一家酒吧见面，公司有 100 名员工，我们有 15 到 30 个人，并决定通过公司的内部反馈渠道提出这个问题。

We didn’t expect the CEO to agree since it would hurt his bottom line, so we planned to form an organization to push this issue.” But much to Markus’s and his colleagues’ surprise, the CEO caved when they raised the issue as a group.

我们没想到首席执行官会同意，因为这会损害他的底线，所以我们计划成立一个组织来推动这个问题。”但令马库斯和他的同事惊讶的是，当他们作为一个团队提出这个问题时，首席执行官屈服了。

His current company, however, isn’t giving in to pressure so easily.

然而，他现在的公司并没有那么容易屈服于压力。

“The Trump campaign was one of our customers,” he explained.

“特朗普竞选团队是我们的客户之一，”他解释道。

While his current CEO likewise insists that the company can’t discriminate based on a customer’s political beliefs, Markus isn’t easily discouraged.

尽管他现任首席执行官同样坚称公司不能根据客户的政治信仰进行歧视，但马库斯并不轻易气馁。

“We’re waiting until the next election cycle to raise the issue.

“我们正在等到下一个选举周期才提出这个问题。

It’ll be a perfect time for us to say, ‘We won’t allow you to support Trump’s campaign with the tools we created.’”

这将是我们说的最佳时机，‘我们不会允许你们用我们创建的工具来支持特朗普的竞选活动。’”

Rooted in the traditional organizations of the labor movement (in the Bay Area, the group meets in a UNITE HERE building), TWC is leading the way in broadening the definition of “tech worker” to include blue- and white-collar workers alike.

TWC 植根于传统的劳工运动组织（在湾区，该团体在 UNITE HERE 大楼内聚会），TWC 正在引领扩大“技术工人”定义的范围，将蓝领工人和白领工人都包括在内。

Divisions between classes of workers are often more visible in tech than in other industries, as low-wage workers are employed by third-party contractors and white-collar workers are themselves stratified, with badge colors signifying where they can go, what facilities they can use, and in some cases, who they can talk to.

在科技行业，工人阶级之间的划分往往比其他行业更加明显，因为低薪工人受雇于第三方承包商，而白领工人本身也是分层的，徽章颜色表示他们可以去哪里、可以使用什么设施，以及在某些情况下可以与谁交谈。

At Intel, “they fired every cafeteria worker the day before Thanksgiving and told the new [non-union] company not to rehire them,” said Murphy, the security guard on Facebook’s main campus.

在英特尔，“他们在感恩节前一天解雇了所有自助餐厅员工，并告诉新的（非工会）公司不要重新雇用他们，”Facebook 主园区的保安墨菲说。

Before he worked at Facebook, he worked at Intel, and before Intel, Apple.

在加入 Facebook 之前，他曾在英特尔工作，在英特尔之前又在苹果工作过。

As Murphy pointed out, the subcontracting model allows tech giants to access the services their operations require without having to bear the responsibilities or costs of direct employment.

正如墨菲指出的那样，分包模式允许科技巨头获得其运营所需的服务，而无需承担直接雇佣的责任或成本。

“The point of subcontracting is to make the labor force unstable,” added Murphy.

“分包的目的是使劳动力不稳定，”墨菲补充道。

“It’s why we pushed for the worker retention ordinance in the city of Santa Clara, where Intel is based — to mandate that when a company switches any of its subcontractors, the workers have the right to keep their jobs at the same rate of pay.”

“这就是为什么我们在英特尔总部所在的圣克拉拉市推动工人保留条例，规定当一家公司更换任何分包商时，工人有权以相同的工资水平保持工作。”

Recounting his conversations with techies during the Intel union campaign, Murphy said, “The techie mind-set is that they want to help and feel good about what they’re doing.

墨菲在回忆英特尔工会运动期间与技术人员的对话时说：“技术人员的心态是，他们希望提供帮助，并对自己所做的事情感到满意。

That’s the cliché of Silicon Valley, ‘making the world a better place.’ So they want to feel like they’re doing that.

这是硅谷的陈词滥调，“让世界变得更美好”。所以他们希望感觉自己正在这样做。

At Intel, if I had a personal relationship with someone, they’d say ‘I want to support you.’”

在英特尔，如果我与某人有私人关系，他们会说‘我想支持你。’”

Murphy believes the best thing techies can do to support service workers is to advocate for an end to subcontracting.

墨菲认为，技术人员为支持服务人员所能做的最好的事情就是倡导结束分包。

“My coworkers and I dream about going direct with Facebook: that’s where the money is, that’s where the power is, and this artifice of subcontracting is just a scheme to hold down our wages and prevent us from getting a whack at the Facebook piñata.” Fred, the techie who led the DSA Tech Action meeting I attended, shares this goal, saying that while he sees the same female janitor in his office every evening, he avoids asking her how she is, whether she gets maternity leave, or anything else about her working conditions because he doesn’t want to put her job in jeopardy: “I don’t know what policies she’s governed under and whether I’d endanger her position by asking her about it.” If tech did away with subcontractors, he explained, “I’d know that anyone I see in the workplace is a coworker, and that we have the same hierarchy above us.”

“我和我的同事梦想直接与 Facebook 合作：那是钱所在，那是权力所在，而这种分包的诡计只是为了压低我们的工资，防止我们受到 Facebook 皮纳塔的打击。”领导我参加的 DSA 技术行动会议的技术人员 Fred 也有同样的目标，他说，虽然他每天晚上都会在办公室看到同一个女看门人，但他避免询问她过得怎么样、是否有产假或任何有关她工作条件的事情，因为他不想让她的工作陷入危险：“我不知道她受什么政策管辖，也不知道问她这些问题是否会危及她的职位。”他解释说，如果科技取消了分包商，“我就会知道我在工作场所看到的任何人都是同事，而且我们的等级制度高于我们。”

While none of the TWC organizers I interviewed named the end of subcontracting as a goal, their actions suggest they’d be amenable to the approach.

虽然我采访的 TWC 组织者中没有一个将结束分包作为目标，但他们的行动表明他们愿意接受这种方法。

In addition to organizing Facebook subcontractors, TWC members joined delegations of blue-collar workers in delivering petitions to tech CEOs demanding that striking immigrant workers not be fired for their participation in 2017 May Day events.

除了组织 Facebook 分包商外，TWC 成员还与蓝领工人代表团一起向科技公司首席执行官提交请愿书，要求不要因参加 2017 年五一劳动节活动而解雇罢工的移民工人。

Says Sheets, “We were successful in getting Facebook and Google to agree to non-retaliation agreements for workers who decided to strike on that day.” Similarly, Tech Solidarity in Seattle used Coworker.org to organize a petition for techies to sign in support of security officers unionizing at Amazon.

希茨说：“我们成功地让 Facebook 和谷歌同意对当天决定罢工的工人达成不报复协议。”同样，西雅图的 Tech Solidarity 利用 Coworker.org 组织了一份请愿书，要求技术人员签名支持亚马逊的安全官员成立工会。

It attracted 1,300 signatures.

它吸引了 1,300 个签名。

As Jeffrey Atkinson, a TWC-affiliated product manager in Seattle, told me, “We’d go out on lunch breaks and during evenings and talk to people on the street about what they thought about workers’ rights.

正如西雅图 TWC 附属产品经理杰弗里·阿特金森 (Jeffrey Atkinson) 告诉我的那样，“我们会在午休时间和晚上出去，与街上的人们谈论他们对工人权利的看法。

Between the street canvassing and online petition, we got those signatures, and delivered them with a sit-in action at an Amazon office on August 18, 2017.”

通过街头拉票和网上请愿，我们得到了这些签名，并于 2017 年 8 月 18 日在亚马逊办公室通过静坐行动交付了这些签名。”

The end of subcontracting may seem distant, but things are beginning to change.

分包的终结似乎还很遥远，但情况正在开始改变。

A few months ago, a union organizer showed up to a Tech Action meeting seeking contacts with Googlers.

几个月前，一位工会组织者出席了一次技术行动会议，寻求与谷歌员工的联系。

Fred connected him with Jake, the Google software engineer.

弗雷德（Fred）为他联系了谷歌软件工程师杰克（Jake）。

Before long, collaboration between blue- and white-collar employees at the New York Google offices was under way.

不久之后，纽约谷歌办事处的蓝领和白领员工之间的合作就开始了。

The tech workers I spoke with disagreed about what shape tech unions would take, if successful.

我采访过的技术工人对于技术工会如果成功的话将采取什么形式存在不同意见。

When asked whether the old union mold would fit, Miller said, “We need something that acknowledges that it’s not just managers and factory workers on a contained shop floor.” Tech’s dispersed workforce presents a challenge for the traditional union structure.

当被问及旧的工会模式是否适合时，米勒说，“我们需要一些东西来承认，在封闭的车间里，不仅仅是经理和工厂工人。”科技行业分散的劳动力对传统的工会结构提出了挑战。

As an industry strewn with independent contractors and subcontractors (far-flung “little fiefdoms” as Markus put it), tech may well call for a reconfiguring of union structures originally created to represent geographically centralized workplaces.

作为一个充满独立承包商和分包商（马库斯所说的遥远的“小封地”）的行业，科技行业很可能需要重新配置最初为代表地理上集中的工作场所而创建的工会结构。

The dispersed workforce also presents a challenge for the traditional union process.

分散的劳动力也给传统的工会流程带来了挑战。

While Markus says union organizers were “verbally supportive” of his efforts to organize tech workplaces in Chicago, he believes they’re not interested in extending resources for a fight they don’t think they can win, which would involve remote, contract, and other loosely connected workers: “They aren’t ready to deploy organizers.” Others spoke of reaching out to unions and never hearing back, or having union organizers lose touch with them over time.

虽然马库斯表示，工会组织者“口头上支持”他在芝加哥组织科技工作场所的努力，但他认为，他们对为一场他们认为无法获胜的斗争提供资源不感兴趣，这将涉及远程、合同工和其他联系松散的工人：“他们还没有准备好部署组织者。”其他人则谈到与工会联系但从未收到回复，或者随着时间的推移工会组织者与他们失去联系。

Concerned with retaining their membership amid an anti-union climate the likes of which we haven’t seen in generations, many unions aren’t interested in going on the offensive.

由于担心在我们几代人都没有见过的反工会气氛中保留自己的会员资格，许多工会对发起进攻不感兴趣。

With no union support on the horizon, the most militant among the burgeoning tech workers’ movement are on their own.

由于没有工会的支持，新兴的科技工人运动中最激进的部分只能依靠自己。

“The onus is on us,” said Markus.

“责任在我们身上，”马库斯说。

“We’ll build a movement, and the unions will come.”

“我们将发起一场运动，工会就会来。”

But as the tech sector reaches further into every aspect of our lives, organizing tech companies needn’t be an isolated, insular project.

但随着科技行业进一步深入到我们生活的方方面面，组织科技公司不必是一个孤立的项目。

At a company like Amazon, organizing could bring currently outsourced service workers under the company’s umbrella, as well as the warehouse workers of Amazon’s infamous just-in-time fulfillment centers.

在亚马逊这样的公司，组织可以将目前外包的服务人员以及亚马逊臭名昭著的即时履行中心的仓库工人纳入公司的保护范围内。

Because of their position in the US economy, these workers, if organized, could revolutionize the labor movement.

由于他们在美国经济中的地位，这些工人如果组织起来，可能会彻底改变劳工运动。

An Amazon union could likewise incorporate the workers toiling on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk platform, which allows companies to outsource repetitive, often demeaning tasks — labeling photos, transcribing a minute or two of an audio file — to what is often called “artificial intelligence” but is, in reality, a population of invisible workers, including many from particularly marginalized countries, who are paid pennies.

亚马逊工会同样可以将在亚马逊 Mechanical Turk 平台上辛勤工作的工人纳入其中，该平台允许公司将重复性的、通常有辱人格的任务——给照片贴标签、转录一两分钟的音频文件——外包给通常被称为“人工智能”的人，但实际上，他们是一群看不见的工人，其中包括许多来自特别边缘化国家的工人，他们的工资微薄。

3 If the most advantaged of Amazon workers led the way, insisting on collective bargaining agreements that applied to everyone within the company, these denizens of the global Amazon fiefdom could be unified under one big contract.

3 如果最有优势的亚马逊员工带头，坚持适用于公司内部每个人的集体谈判协议，那么亚马逊全球领地的这些居民就可以在一份大合同下统一起来。

From the baseline of a unionized tech sector, a picture emerges for the possibility of worker-owned companies, which could receive startup capital from the state (much as the military has underwritten tech’s greatest successes).

从工会科技行业的基线来看，工人拥有的公司的可能性就出现了，这些公司可以从国家获得启动资金（就像军方为科技最伟大的成功提供了担保一样）。

As Fred put it, “changing the way venture capital works, so it isn’t four or so major firms deciding all the tech that will be funded,” will be necessary to gaining popular, democratic control over the direction of the industry.

正如弗雷德所说，“改变风险投资的运作方式，这样就不再有四家左右的大公司决定将资助的所有技术”，这对于获得对该行业方向的普遍、民主的控制是必要的。

Eventually, the goal is a model of investors unencumbered by the profit motive, who fund what is socially useful, instead of more apps to extract yet more ads.

最终，我们的目标是建立一个不受利润动机阻碍的投资者模型，他们为对社会有用的东西提供资金，而不是通过更多应用程序来提取更多广告。

Cegłowski suggests a public advocacy model along the lines of those in place at the Centers for Disease Control, or among librarians.

切格洛夫斯基建议建立一种类似于疾病控制中心或图书馆员的公共倡导模式。

An organization of tech workers could be a conduit between the public and the industry, with public concern and democratic pressure flowing into the organization’s considerations, and expertise, advocacy, and cautionary information flowing from the workers to the general public.

技术工作者组织可以成为公众和行业之间的渠道，公众的关注和民主压力会流入组织的考虑范围，而专业知识、宣传和警示信息会从工作者流向公众。

Rather than viewing tech as distinct in all ways from other industries, a self-enclosed innovation loop, Cegłowski’s vision emphasizes the industry’s entrenchment in society — its reliance on the same shared, social world.

切格洛夫斯基的愿景并没有将科技视为与其他行业截然不同的自我封闭的创新循环，而是强调该行业在社会中的根深蒂固——它对同一个共享的社交世界的依赖。

Following this train of thought leads to other, utopian ideas: nationalizing the internet, which is already the beneficiary of hundreds of millions of dollars in public funding; making all software open-sourced and transparent, to allow for public scrutiny into the application of what could be racially coded or otherwise biased algorithms; the list goes on.

遵循这一思路会导致其他乌托邦式的想法：将互联网国有化，这已经是数亿美元公共资金的受益者；使所有软件开源且透明，以便公众监督可能带有种族编码或其他偏见算法的应用；这样的例子不胜枚举。

In January of 2018, workers at Lanetix, a logistics technology company based in San Francisco and Washington DC, filed with the National Labor Relations Board for a union election.

2018 年 1 月，总部位于旧金山和华盛顿特区的物流技术公司 Lanetix 的工人向国家劳工关系委员会申请举行工会选举。

Theirs would have been the first union in the US made up entirely of software engineers.

他们的工会将成为美国第一个完全由软件工程师组成的工会。

About ten days after they filed the petition with the NLRB, Lanetix fired them, announcing plans to outsource its operations to Eastern Europe.

在他们向 NLRB 提交请愿书大约十天后，Lanetix 解雇了他们，并宣布计划将其业务外包到东欧。

Björn Westergard, one of the fired engineers, told me the organizing drive’s proximate cause was “the retaliatory firing of a coworker who had consistently been a spokesperson for us on a number of issues, most notably paid time off.” Regarding the grievances that drove the organizing effort, Westergard says, “We were tired of managerial caprice in compensation, working conditions, and assignments; this caprice often seemed to favor the more experienced men (myself included).

被解雇的工程师之一比约恩·韦斯特加德 (Björn Westergard) 告诉我，这次组织活动的直接原因是“报复性解雇了一位同事，他一直是我们在许多问题上的发言人，尤其是带薪休假。”关于推动组织工作的不满情绪，韦斯特加德说：“我们厌倦了管理层在薪酬、工作条件和任务方面的反复无常；这种反复无常似乎往往有利于更有经验的人（包括我自己）。

Second, we wanted management to replace two highly qualified staff engineers who had left the company so that we could keep up with the skill demands of the industry.”

其次，我们希望管理层替换两名离开公司的高素质工程师，以便我们能够跟上行业的技能需求。”

While the union has filed an unfair labor practices complaint with the NLRB, in the immediate aftermath of the mass layoff, TWC and Tech Action were among the first to respond, releasing a statement in solidarity with the fired engineers.

虽然工会已向 NLRB 提出不公平劳工行为投诉，但在大规模裁员之后，TWC 和 Tech Action 率先做出回应，发布了一份声明，声援被解雇的工程师。

These organizers might still be in the early stages of building power, but the rest of us can only hope they succeed, and quickly.

这些组织者可能仍处于建立权力的早期阶段，但我们其他人只能希望他们能够尽快成功。

Markus summed up the possibilities: “We’re inching toward a dystopia, and it’s being created by people who see themselves as liberal.

马库斯总结了各种可能性：“我们正在慢慢走向反乌托邦，而它是由自视为自由主义者的人们创造的。

And we need to organize, or else venture capitalists and CEOs are going to destroy our society.”

我们需要组织起来，否则风险资本家和首席执行官将摧毁我们的社会。”

When only first names are used, individuals’ names have been changed.

当仅使用名字时，个人的姓名已被更改。

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Due to an editorial error, an earlier version of this piece implied that these workers were largely from “marginalized countries.” Most are in fact in the United States.

由于编辑错误，本文的早期版本暗示这些工人主要来自“边缘化国家”。事实上，大多数都在美国。

We regret the error.

我们对这个错误感到遗憾。

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