because these statements are instrumental to building power. They are not a draft of a negotiation proposal. They are a galvanizing message for workers, not a formal demand. Without power, formal demands are pointless. To build power, clarity, concreteness and directness beats idealism, rigour and formalism every day.

I’ve been in tech labor organizing for 8 years at this point. I know written documents matter pretty much nothing for organizing, let alone tech workers organizing. And yes, tech workers need a simple language.

The statement you’ve written is very good to argue on the internet, but it closes any avenue for picking winnable issues in the real world. If the original one sets a clear, achievable goal (canceling a new contract), the one you wrote prevents any kind of realistic demand and sets an unachievable goal for a newly formed union.

If you speak a language workers don’t understand, you increase the cognitive load and lower interest and participation. It’s a trade-off and it’s an ineliminabile part of the game. Being correct and being useful are two different things

It’s labor organizing, not intellectual engagement. The point is to build power in the company, not argue about vocabulary. Words are instrumental, they are not the goal.

The author is Italian teaching in Canada. While it’s true that in the USA democratic structures in the workplace are less common than elsewhere, I think the author is presenting the phenomenon in a rethorical fashion to motivate workers to fight the new forms of Authorian control in the workplace.

are you behind a VPN? Because disconnecting from my VPN it started working again.

as if leftists behaved any better

Puoi parlare in italiano in ogni comunità. Basta che ignori le lamentele dei mangiahamburger

logical fallacies are out of context when used in a normal conversation rather than a scientific debate. It’s just a way to escape and kill the conversation.

happy to be presented with counterevidence

How do you explain to yourself that religious and spiritual people are the drivers of mainstream politics and new political ideologies, while atheists/modernists/disenchanted are pretty much either irrelevant or clinging desperately to their position of vaning power, paralyzed, and often depressed?

did you ever organize a strike in a big company?

You live in a world of fantasy. Fascists are taking over the whole of the West. Do something about it and stop larping.

You’re fetishizing Non-Westeners because the strategy you want to use work there and not here, and instead of changing strategy, you project yourself into a different context. The article is clearly about the Global North, for which what you described has failed over and over. You make politics with the people you have, not with the people you would like to have. Blaming workers for not being receptive to your strategies is delusional.

Not sure what kind of humans you know, but nobody likes for a stranger to get there, push their political opinions, call it science, say it’s for their good, and imply you know fuckshit in the process. It’s fine for edgy debates on the internet, but it doesn’t fly to build relationships in the real world. Especially if on the other side there’s somebody saying “You’re fine as you are, come with me, I will make you rich.”

For the same reason we don’t use tractors in union organizing, we also don’t use AI.

because your coworkers are more likely not leftist and talking about ideological points doesn’t bring them on your side. The workplace is not an internet leftist theory chat.

software, beyond Excel, doesn’t really help with unionizing in any meaningful way. Why would you think of applying AI would do something?

That’s contradictory with the direct experience of most workers, where AI is something forced upon them by managers and that creates more problem than it solves. The minority using agentic AI is also probably harder to organize, so better relate to the majority that is discontent than the minority that is vibe-coding.

yeah, and now they understood it’s an existential threat and they are moving away. Real money is pouring to switch as fast as possible. Not saying it’s good or done properly or serving the people of Europe, but the politicians have finally began to freak out about this stuff, also because it’s a lot of money to be made.