Professionals band together at Microsoft, IBM
Well before the burst of the bubble, Marcus Courtney and his colleagues on contract at Microsoft were already feeling let down by their employer.
Courtney had been temping as a tester at Microsoft. He was there for 18 months but knew of other contractors working three, four or five years. “Permatemps,” they were calling themselves. At Microsoft’s office in Seattle, they made up nearly half of the employee base, said Courtney.
Dissatisfied, a number of contractors got together and formed a group called Washington Alliance of Technology Workers, also known as WashTech. Communicating with each other mostly via the Internet, the group started out with about a dozen members. And as contract workers, they had no hope of forming a union.
“So we kind of went the high-bred advocacy model — part union, part advocate,” said Courtney, president of WashTech, which now has 450 dues-paying members.
That model was similar to that adopted by IBM workers in the state of New York. This group also came together out of frustration, after learning that the company was planning to convert defined benefit pensions into cash pensions, said Alliance@IBM president Linda Guyer.
“When we were hired on, we were promised a good pension in return for a lower salary. So many employees were extremely upset. We realized that if we didn’t have things in writing from the company, they could take things away anytime,” said Guyer.
Drawing on the resources of the Communications Workers of America, both WashTech and Alliance@IBM have decided to delay seeking a certification vote. Having no bargaining power over employee contracts, the two groups instead use the courts, legislatures and the media to campaign for better work conditions.
It was Alliance@IBM that, for example, brought the company’s offshore outsourcing plans to the media, helping to launch the issue onto the presidential election agenda. And recently, when Microsoft made cuts to employee benefits to bring down costs, WashTech promptly called newspapers with the results of an informal poll of employees that showed about 90 per cent dissatisfied or very dissatisfied.
Mark Leier, director of the Centre for Labour Studies at Simon Fraser University in B.C., wouldn’t be surprised to see IT workers looking at ways to organize themselves, through unions or otherwise. The shine is wearing off as the industry matures and the work becomes routinized, he said.
“There are a lot of young workers who had bought in to many of the promises of work and realized that the reality is quite different. It may not be that they’re saying, ‘Gee, I wish I could join a union.’ But they’re saying things like, ‘I wish there’s a way I could make my needs known to an employer.’”
Courtney had been temping as a tester at Microsoft. He was there for 18 months but knew of other contractors working three, four or five years. “Permatemps,” they were calling themselves. At Microsoft’s office in Seattle, they made up nearly half of the employee base, said Courtney.
Dissatisfied, a number of contractors got together and formed a group called Washington Alliance of Technology Workers, also known as WashTech. Communicating with each other mostly via the Internet, the group started out with about a dozen members. And as contract workers, they had no hope of forming a union.
“So we kind of went the high-bred advocacy model — part union, part advocate,” said Courtney, president of WashTech, which now has 450 dues-paying members.
That model was similar to that adopted by IBM workers in the state of New York. This group also came together out of frustration, after learning that the company was planning to convert defined benefit pensions into cash pensions, said Alliance@IBM president Linda Guyer.
“When we were hired on, we were promised a good pension in return for a lower salary. So many employees were extremely upset. We realized that if we didn’t have things in writing from the company, they could take things away anytime,” said Guyer.
Drawing on the resources of the Communications Workers of America, both WashTech and Alliance@IBM have decided to delay seeking a certification vote. Having no bargaining power over employee contracts, the two groups instead use the courts, legislatures and the media to campaign for better work conditions.
It was Alliance@IBM that, for example, brought the company’s offshore outsourcing plans to the media, helping to launch the issue onto the presidential election agenda. And recently, when Microsoft made cuts to employee benefits to bring down costs, WashTech promptly called newspapers with the results of an informal poll of employees that showed about 90 per cent dissatisfied or very dissatisfied.
Mark Leier, director of the Centre for Labour Studies at Simon Fraser University in B.C., wouldn’t be surprised to see IT workers looking at ways to organize themselves, through unions or otherwise. The shine is wearing off as the industry matures and the work becomes routinized, he said.
“There are a lot of young workers who had bought in to many of the promises of work and realized that the reality is quite different. It may not be that they’re saying, ‘Gee, I wish I could join a union.’ But they’re saying things like, ‘I wish there’s a way I could make my needs known to an employer.’”
