A book based on labor ideas from the early 20th century has provided a blueprint for workers at Google, Uber, and Kickstarter to organize without a formal union
A book based on ideas associated with a labor group from the early 20th century has provided a blueprint for organizing without a union. Tweets: @nytimesbusiness , @nytimes , @tobiashigbie , @choffmanuni , @freedaaron , @amtransparency , @mer__edith , @mattdpearce , @alexnpress , @noamscheiber , and @shannoncoulter Tweets: @nytimesbusiness : The book “Labor Law for the Rank and Filer” lays out a practical guide for staging a kind of workplace revolution that upends the balance of power between management and labor. Employees at Google, Kickstarter and Uber are taking notice. https://www.nytimes.com/... @nytimes : Google employees and Uber drivers have found a blueprint for organizing without a formal union: a book called “Labor Law for the Rank and Filer,” based on the strategies of a radical labor group of the early 20th century https://www.nytimes.com/... Toby Higbie / @tobiashigbie : Staughton Lynd's book lives on! Recall reading this years ago when thinking about unionizing grad assistants when the state law said we couldn't. The Radical Guidebook Embraced by Google Workers and Uber Drivers https://www.nytimes.com/... Christy Hoffman / @choffmanuni : Not all googlers (or Uber drivers) have rejected unions in favor of other forms of protest. Many googlers around the world have joined where minority unions are the norm. Part of the US union “futility” is driven by the broken US model where it is nearly impossible to win 50%+1 https://twitter.com/... Aaron Freedman / @freedaaron : Curious to hear the thoughts of socialists more knowledgeable about the labor movement than me, but it seems like avoiding NLRB-recognized unions—rather than joining them and making them more militant—is a bad idea for workers and the larger labor movement https://www.nytimes.com/... @amtransparency : We read the “solidarity unionism” piece going around and ruffling some feathers. definitely recommend museums and arts folks read it. Our thoughts: 1. all worker organizing is good! 1/2 https://www.nytimes.com/... Meredith Whittaker / @mer__edith : Great overview of one of the books that informed tech worker organizing at Google and beyond, helping lay out options for action and the limits of the law. (I'd replace “Radical Manifesto” with “Common Sense Guide” but headlines aren't my specialty...) https://www.nytimes.com/... Matt Pearce / @mattdpearce : Oh wow, a lot of tech workers involved in Silicon Valley's labor unrest have been studying to Wobblies, which explains a lot. https://www.nytimes.com/... Alex Press / @alexnpress : this is great but also reading it makes me feel like I'm hallucinating https://www.nytimes.com/... Noam Scheiber / @noamscheiber : Not everything in tech is new. For example, it turns out tech workers are drawing on the ideas of radical labor organizers from the early 1900s to take on Google and Microsoft. https://www.nytimes.com/... Shannon Coulter / @shannoncoulter : I truly love that many Google employees had read an early 20th century labor law book just before 20,000 of them went on strike last fall to protest the company's handling of sexual harassment. 💪https://www.nytimes.com/ ...
Context & Ripple Effects
The organizing infrastructure was already visible before the book arrived: US tech workers had been coordinating political activism through Slack, Signal, and shared documents, as chronicled earlier in 2019, and the walkout by some 20,000 Google employees had just demonstrated that ad-hoc coalitions could force concessions without any union on the ballot.
'Labor Law for the Rank and Filer' gives those loose networks a doctrine — direct action grounded in early-20th-century labor ideas rather than the formal NLRB election process — which is why it circulated among Google, Uber, and Kickstarter employees specifically.
First-order effects
- Employees at Google, Uber, and Kickstarter gain a practical playbook for collective pressure — work slowdowns, public demands, solidarity actions — that bypasses the slow, employer-controllable formal union-election timeline.
- Management at those companies faces collective action it cannot resolve through the usual anti-union channels, since there is no certification vote to contest and no bargaining unit to stall.
Second-order effects
- Employers shift toward monitoring and suppression tactics against informal organizers, which is exactly why labor leaders have moved coordination onto Facebook Groups and platforms like Coworker.org to keep organizing from being surveilled out of existence.
- The worker-concern angle sharpens where organizing targets product itself — as with companies building surveillance tools criticized for enabling human-rights abuses, where refusing compliance becomes part of the repertoire.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, tech labor relations bifurcate into formal unions on one side and decentralized rank-and-file networks on the other — but the latter's power is cyclical, and by late 2025 coverage shows tech worker activism has grown more cautious as crackdowns landed and once-privileged workers found they lacked real leverage.
- That cycle suggests the durable question for regulators and platforms alike is whether non-union collective action gets recognized protections at all, or remains exposed to whatever each employer's surveillance stack permits.
The trend: Tech worker organizing is evolving from formal union campaigns toward decentralized rank-and-file action whose effectiveness rises and falls with the sector's labor-market leverage.