Labor Relations Commons^™

Google Has A Labor Problem, And It’S Not Just Coming From Its Employees, Daniel Whateley

Capstones

For decades, technology companies have used temporary and contract workers to lower costs, creating a shadow workforce of thousands of indirect employees. That business model is now under threat.

In September 2019, 80 contract workers at Google’s Pittsburgh office voted to unionize with the United Steelworkers, the first time that white-collar tech workers in the U.S. have successfully organized with a union. These contractors are employees of HCL Technologies, an Indian multinational IT and consulting company that partners with Google around the world.

Tech and office workers face a different set of workplace issues from blue-collar and factory employees, which …

Special Issue Introduction: Labor In Academic Libraries, Emily Drabinski, Aliqae Geraci, Roxanne Shirazi

Publications and Research

Labor in academic libraries has reemerged as an area of critical interest in both academic library and archives communities. Librarians and archivists have long worked to counter the diminishment of their labor within an academy that centers the concerns of disciplinary faculty who may, in turn, see knowledge workers as a footnote to the scholarly enterprise. Recent years have seen a renewed attention to the social and economic conditions of our work, as researchers turned to topics such as affective labor in libraries and archives, attitudes toward labor unions, and information work under capitalism (Sloniowski 2016; Mills and McCullough 2018; …