Notices by Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)

Albedos considered harmful

House Republicans have a great plan to pay for Trump's tax-cuts for the rich: jacking up the cost of federal student loans, while eliminating protections for students who are scammed by fake universities:

https://prospect.org/education/2025-04-30-republicans-education-upper-class-privilege-student-loans/

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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/30/trump-u/#i-think-you-know-what-the-trustees-can-do-with-their-suggestions

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Tech workers *can* avoid the fate of the factory, warehouse and delivery workers their bosses literally work to death - but only by unionizing.

In other words, the workers in re-shored factories and tech workers need the same thing. They are class allies - and tech bosses are their class enemies. This is class war.

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He doesn't just want to bring home iPhone production, he wants to import the suicide nets of iPhone City, too.

Tech workers *are* workers, and they once held the line against enshittification, refusing to breaak the things they'd built for their bosses in meaningless all-nighters motivated by vocational awe.

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Long after tech bosses were able to buy all their competitors, capture their regulators, and expand IP law to neutralize the threat of innovative, interoperable products like alternative app stores, ad-blockers and jailbreaking kits, tech workers held the line.

There've been half a million US tech layoff since 2023. Tech workers' scarcity-derived power has been vaporized.

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But Trump has gutted the National Labor Relations Board and stacked his administration with bloodsucking scabs like Elon Musk. Trump doesn't want to bring good jobs back to America - he wants to bring *bad* jobs back to America. He wants to reshore manufacturing jobs from territories with terrible wages, deadly labor conditions, and no environment controls by taking away Americans' wages, labor rights and environmental protections.

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Re-shoring industrial jobs to the USA is a perfectly reasonable goal. Between uncertain geopolitics, climate chaos, monopolization and the lurking spectre of the next pandemic, we should assume that supply-chains will be repeatedly and cataclysmicly shocked over the next century or more. And yes, re-shoring product *could* provide good jobs to working people - but only if they're unionized.

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Trump's new gangster capitalism pits immiserated blue collar workers against the "professional and managerial class," attacking universities and other institutions that promised social mobility to the children of working families.

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Trump has a point when he lionized factory work as a source of excellent wages and benefits for working people without degrees, but he conspicuously fails to mention that factory work was deadly, low-waged and miserable - until factory workers formed *unions*:

https://www.laborpolitics.com/p/unions-not-just-factories-will-make

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Companies are scaling back perks in both meaningful ways (Netflix hacking away at parental leave), and petty ones (Netflix and Google cutting back on free branded swag for workers). Google's hacked back its "fun budget" for offsite team-building activities and replacement laptops for workers needing faster machines (so much for prioritizing "increasing worker productivity").

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For decades, tech workers were able to flatter themselves that they were peers with their bosses - that "temporarily embarrassed founder" syndrome again. The Google founders and Zuck held regular "town hall" meetings where the rank-and-file engineers could ask impertinent questions. At Google, these have been replaced with "tightly scripted events." Zuckerberg has discontinued his participation in company-wide Q&As, because they are "no longer a good use of his time."

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The point of AI isn't to make workers more productive, it's to make them weaker when they bargain with their bosses. Another of Bindley's sources went through *eight rounds* of interviews with a company, received an offer, countered with a request for 12% more than the offer, and had the job withdrawn, because "the company didn’t want to move ahead anymore based on the way the compensation conversation had gone."

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Bindley spoke to David Markley, an Amazon veteran turned executive coach, who attributed the worsening conditions (for example, managers being given 30 direct reports) to the "narrative" of AI. Not, you'll note, the *actual reality* of AI, but rather, the *story* that AI lets you "collapse the organization," slash headcount and salaries, and pauperize the (former) princes of labor.

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She has to continuously reapply for her job, and has picked up the workload of several fired colleagues who weren't re-hired. Meta managers (the ones whose bonuses were just doubled) call this initiative "agility." Amazon is famous for spying on its warehouse workers and drivers - and now its tech staff report getting popups warning them that their keystrokes are being monitored and analyzed, and their screens are being recorded.

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Amazon is another firm whose top exec, Andy Jassy, has boasted about the productivity gains of AI, but an Amazon Web Services manager who spoke to Bindley says that he's lost so many coders that he's now writing code for the first time in a decade.

Then there's a Meta recruiter who got fired and then immediately re-hired, but as a "short term employee" with no merit pay, stock grants, or promotions.

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Brin returned to Google to oversee its sweaty and desperate "pivot to AI," and like so many tech execs, he's been trumpeting the increased productivity that chatbots will deliver for coders. But a coder who picks up their fired colleagues' work load by pulling 60-hour work-weeks isn't "more productive," they're more *exploited*.

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But it's not just the workers who get shown the door who suffer in this new tech reality - the workers on the job are having to do two or three jobs, for worse pay, and without all those lovely perks.

Take Google, where founder Sergey Brin just told his workers that they should be aiming for a "sweet spot" of 60 hours/week.

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This is how tech bosses would treat tech workers...if they could.

And now? They can.

Writing for the *Wall Street Journal*, Katherine Bindley describes the new labor dynamics at Big Tech:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/tech-workers-are-just-like-the-rest-of-us-miserable-at-work/ar-AA1DDKjh

It starts with Meta, who just announced a 5% across-the-board layoff - on the same day that it *doubled* executive bonuses.

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Bezos's engineers get soft-play areas, an imported Australian barista for each mini-kitchen, and the kind of Japanese toilet that doesn't just wash after but also offers a trim and dye-job, but Amazon delivery drivers are monitored by AIs that narc them out for driving with their mouths open (singing is prohibited in Uncle Jeff's delivery pods!) and have to piss in bottles; meanwhile, Amazon warehouse workers are injured at *three times* the rate of other warehouse workers.

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Sure, Tim Cook's engineers get beer-fattened, chestnut finished and massaged like Kobe cows, but Cook's *factory* workers in China are so maltreated that Foxconn (the cutout Apple uses to run "iPhone City" where Apple's products are made) had to install suicide nets to reduce the amount of spatter from workers who would rather die than put in another hour at Tim Apple's funtime distraction rectangle factory:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jun/18/foxconn-life-death-forbidden-city-longhua-suicide-apple-iphone-brian-merchant-one-device-extract

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