Last week more than 20,000 Google works strolled out of their workplace to rally, and requirement major changes in, how the company holds provocation and discrimination. Mass employee organization, challenges made of management — doesn’t that all vaguely remind you of some kind of old-fashioned twentieth-century perception? What was it called again? The name’s on the tip-off of my tongue, I swear…

A participant said, “Just the threat of us walking out was sufficient for the company to remove DeVaul from the payroll, ” referring to Richard DeVaul, the Google executive who resigned this week amid a swirling rain of the allegations of unprofessional behavior and worse. Meanwhile, an organizer of the walkout said, plaintively,” I hope I still have a career in Silicon Valley after this” … while other organizers declined to go on the record.

If simply there were some formal, structured route in which tech works could generate grievances to their management, and negotiate with them as a group, via, say, elected representatives, for whom protection against reprisal could be established. Surely the disruptors and out-of-the-box philosophers of Silicon Valley could come up with some progressive new arrangement for that. Imagine — and I know this sounds like science fiction but bear with me — one day, such a structure might even achieve some kind of special legal recognition and protections.

But what would they call it? I don’t know. Maybe, and I’m just spitballing now, they could call it a “union” or something crazy like that. After the specify procedure, get wise? They like math entendres down at Google, after all…

I am not inevitably saying such a conception is all welfare and no overhead. I’m not even saying I think it would consequently be a net good idea. But it is astonishing to me how nobody seems to have even publicly considered the likelihood, under the circumstances.

I get that the Valley idea of trade union organizations is mostly that of a unspeakable hidebound boa constrictor which suffocates off all hope of quicken and/ or invention. That might well be true, if one were to simply try to apply twentieth-century organization notions, ones which tried to control hours worked and physical ailments, because this organization is the primary concerns of its production and/ or otherwise physical laborers of that era. But it surprises me seriously that nobody seems to even be talking about a” Union 2.0″ perception, one developed for 21 st-century software engineers rather than 20 th-century auto workers, one which didn’t definitely sacrifice velocity, flexibility, or openness to experimentation.

Not least because such could have important repercussions beyond the companies in question. Big tech corporations have become among the most powerful entities in the world, at least indirectly. An debate about government regulation of tech is often that it is both heavy-handed and so brake that by the time it lastly happens it applies to the tech of several years ago and is once basically archaic. This is often a fair analysi, and often applies to legal restitution too.

So what are the the inspections and equilibriums for Big Tech? What patrols and people are able to keep them honest? The self-evident refute is: their employees. Google and Facebook and fellowship panic unrest among their several tens of thousands of employees far more than they do the exasperation of hundreds of million users around the world. It’s by no means a excellent lever of affect, but it’s better than nothing. Whether you want to call it a union or not, I can’t help but think that a more formal formation for grievances, collective dialogue, and protection from reprisal, among employees of major tech corporations, might just has become a pretty good notion for everyone.