This episode of Talk of the Bay, with host Meilin Obinata, honors Labor Day by diving into modern labor issues with health and technology workers. We heard from an anonymous local CVS worker, who shared some of the workplace struggles workers are experiencing, and the role customers can serve to advocate for workers when we visit retail environments. The show included a snippet of music by Jimmy Kelly from the Labor Day festivities hosted by the Monterey Bay Central Labor Council in Romo Park in Watsonville, California.
We spent the bulk of the show with Mia Casesa and Ike McCreery of the Tech Workers Coalition. Casesa and McCreery shared their individual journeys to developing an awareness of themselves as workers – Mia, coming from a fine arts and graphic design background, and Ike from a math, computer science and engineering one. Despite having experiences which appear different on the surface, both found alienation as workers whether from precarious employment post-college leading to jobs paying less than before college or becoming disillusioned with the purposes to which tech employers were directing one’s labor.
Artificial intelligence came up as a topic at different points in our discussion – in the context of Project Maven, a project which attracted labor actions from workers at Google, in response to the goal of producing AI software for the US military along with the different ways the unions in Hollywood handled the issue of AI. We also heard about the role of technology companies in politics and within military applications of tech.
The definition of who “is” a tech worker is something the guests defined as encompassing not only engineers and designers such as the guests but culinary workers, drivers and other workers within tech companies who hold a variety of responsibilities.
The guests invited the workers in the audience to visit the Tech Workers Coalition site and join the Slack.
The Tech Workers Coalition is hosting an event “Circuit Breakers” Saturday October 12 and Sunday October 13 in San Francisco: https://techworkerscoalition.org/circuit-breakers/
To learn more about topics from the show, feel free to see these links:
https://labornotes.org/techcon2023
https://kickstarterunited.org/
link to article about Google’s Project Maven to provide artificial intelligence software to the US military which caused some workers to quit in protest https://archive.ph/BOCLJ
Sharing the Moment of Truth with Ami Chen Mills episode of an interview of Malcolm Harris, the author of the book “Palo Alto” which covers the hidden history of Silicon Valley from the last 170 years and may be of interest to listeners of this Talk of the Bay program. This interview by Paris Marx on the podcast, Tech Won’t Save Us, of Harris includes Harris’s explanation of the role of Filipino and Vietnamese immigrant labor in the early years of Apple Computer.
