Featured presenters
Our featured presenters include workers were active with groups decades ago:
- Dr. Richard Hudson, IBM Black Workers Alliance
- Marceline Donaldson, IBM Black Workers Alliance
- Joan Greenbaum, Computer People for Peace
- Caroline Hunter, Polaroid Revolutionary Workers Movement
- Phil Asquith, The Lucas Plan
- David Bacon, workers organizing at National Semiconductor
In total, we have 33 presenters hosting 13 sessions over 3 days!
Program at-a-glance
Wednesday, October 19. 8:00AM–1:50PM PST
Welcome! Community Agreements Co-creation
Organizing at This Moment in History
Temps, Vendors, & Contractors: Past and Present
Thursday, October 20. 7:00AM–3:30PM PST
Zines an Material Culture in Tech Organizing
Welcome! Zoom opens for mingling
The Lucas Plan: Transforming Industry Through Collective Action
Building Solidarity Across Class and Race
Tech Organizing Throughout the Decades
Best Practices for Remote Organizing
Ethics on the Job: A Tech Worker’s Role in Upholding Values
Friday, October 21. 7:30AM–12:30PM PST
Welcome! Zoom opens for mingling
Organizing Through Oral Histories
Lightning Talks & Future Organizing
Schedule at-a-glance
Time (PST) | Type/Notes | Title | Presenters |
Wednesday, Oct 19 | |||
8:00–8:50 AM | Opening/ Welcome | TWC Teach-In organizers | |
9:00–9:50 AM | Skillshare Recorded | ||
10:00–10:50 AM | Skillshare | ||
11:00–11:50 AM | Roundtable Recorded | ||
Break | |||
1:00–1:50 PM | Roundtable Recorded CART Captions | ||
Thursday, Oct 20 | |||
7:00–7:50 AM | Roundtable Recorded | ||
Break | |||
8:30–9:00 AM | Welcome | TWC Teach-In organizers | |
9:00–9:50 AM | Roundtable Recorded CART Captions | ||
10:00–10:50 AM | Roundtable Recorded | ||
11:00–11:50 AM | Roundtable Recorded | ||
12:00–12:50 PM | Roundtable Recorded CART Captions | ||
Break | |||
2:00–3:30 PM | Skillshare CART Captions | ||
Friday, October 21 | |||
7:30–8:00 AM | Welcome CART Captions | TWC Teach-In organizers | |
8:00–8:50 AM | Skillshare Recorded CART Captions | ||
9:00–9:50 AM | Skillshare CART Captions | ||
Break | |||
10:30 AM –12:30 PM | Closing CART Captions | TWC Teach-In organizers |
Program, Schedule, and Descriptions
Wednesday, October 19
Welcome! Community Agreements Co-creation
8:00–8:50 AM PST
Welcome
TWC organizers
Join us for the opening of the event and help create the community agreements for the next three days.
Organizing at This Moment in History
9:00–9:50 AM PST
Skillshare Recorded
Emerson Harris, Ari Trujillo-John, Steven Pitts
Come learn about the history of labor organizing and the basics of how to organize your workplace! This workshop will be led by IFPTE Local 21 organizing director Emerson Harris and Ari Trujillo and Steven Pitts will provide a space for participants to share stories of organizing successes, failures, and ongoing struggles. Breakout groups will go through hands-on exercises to hone basic workplace organizing skills.
Workers’ Inquiry
10:00–10:50 AM PST
Skillshare
This interactive session will lead participants through a series of questions based around The Workers’ Inquiry. Participants will break into small groups, and go round-robin style to answer questions about how and for whom they perform waged labor. The questions facilitate a discussion around work, and help us to see parallels in our labor across roles and organizations.
Temps, Vendors, & Contractors: Past and Present
11:00–11:50 AM PST
Roundtable Recorded
Veena Dubal, Willy Solis, Thiago Maeda, Udayan Tandon, Shaik Salauddin, Srujana Katta, Aline Os
A roundtable discussion about contract-based work and organizing strategies in tech to connect current ride-hail and delivery app driver struggles to those of workers from recent history. TVCs and gig workers in today’s tech industry share experiences with other precarious workers who also lack workplace protections and benefits.
Break
Against Apartheid Tech
1:00–1:50 PM PST
Roundtable Recorded CART Captions
Caroline Hunter, Gabriel Schubiner
Anti-war protests are less common in the US today compared to the 1970s, but tech companies are more involved in military and surveillance than ever. This roundtable discusses apartheid, tech, and organizing. How does workplace unionism relate to international coalition politics? How can a workers’ movement grow beyond the tech workplace to affect conditions internationally? What does it take to end company contracts for imperialism? Presenters include Caroline Hunter (Polaroid Revolutionary Workers Movement) and Gabriel Schubiner (Drop Nimbus).
Thursday, October 20
Zines and Material Culture in Tech Organizing
7:00–7:50 AM PST
Roundtable Recorded
Dr. Richard Hudson, J. Khadijah Abdurahman
How have workers used zines, pamphlets, newsletters, and other written materials as part of their organizing campaigns? Join J. Khadijah Abdurahman in a live interview with Dr. Richard Hudson, who wrote for and edited the IBM Black Workers Alliance newsletter, in a discussion about using printed matter as an organizing tool.
Break
Welcome! Zoom opens for mingling
8:30–9:00 AM PST
Welcome
TWC organizers
We will open up the Zoom room for half an hour to welcome everyone to day 2.
The Lucas Plan: Transforming Industry Through Collective Action
9:00–9:50 AM PST
Roundtable Recorded CART Captions
Bogdana Rakova, Phil Asquith, Dave King
As organizers, what vision do we have beyond #TechWontBuildIt refusal and reforms to make tech less harmful? In the 1970s a large group of engineers at Lucas Aerospace, the massive UK military contractor, crafted a plan for converting the company into one that makes "socially valuable" technology. Lucas workers tangled with management and their union, which were both too profit-driven and short-sighted to see their plan’s promise. Today, bottom-up, grassroots activism is needed to overcome the environmental and human impact of capitalist greed in the tech industry and beyond. This session discusses how workers can drive industry-wide transformation from the shop floor.
Building Solidarity Across Class and Race
10:00–10:50 AM PST
Roundtable Recorded
Marceline Donaldson, Dorothy R. Santos
What is the difference between solidarity unionism and business unionism? Is working at the executive level or in management at odds with supporting unionization? In this session, Marceline Donaldson, former organizer against IBM and current president of the Bettina Network, and Dorothy R. Santos, Executive Director of the Processing Foundation, discuss their personal relationship with unions and how we might understand the relationship between class and race in order to build worker solidarity.
Tech Organizing Throughout the Decades
11:00–11:50 AM PST
Roundtable Recorded
Joan Greenbaum, David Bacon, Alex Hanna
Recounting their experiences with tech organizing throughout various decades, panelists discuss how tech organizing is unique and how it fits into the rest of the labor movement. Former semiconductor industry labor organizer and current farm workers organizer David Bacon, along with author, professor, and activist Joan Greenbaum, engage in a discussion with Alex Hanna, Director of Research at DAIR, about the role of tech organizing in the labor movement.
Best Practices for Remote Organizing
12:00–12:50 PM PST
Roundtable Recorded CART Captions
Emily Mazo, Marcus Courtney, Michelle Rodino-Colocino, Kathy Zhang
During the pandemic, as many workplaces went remote, workers turned to digital organizing tools. But working from home is not new, and many tech workplaces have long been disparately located; remote solidarities are part of the history of tech worker movements. Participants who were interviewed as part of Collective Action in Tech’s new zine about remote organizing best practices will be in conversation with Marcus Courtney, a former Microsoft contractor and a co-founder of WashTech, and Michelle Rodino-Colocino, a media studies scholar and organizer who was part of WashTech, who describe the digital and analogue tools used by WashTech workers in the late 1990s and early 2000s to organize across various workplaces.
Break
Ethics on the Job: A Tech Worker’s Role in Upholding Values in Computing Systems
2:00–3:30 PM PST
Skillshare
Nataliya Nedzhvetskaya, Kristen Sheets
VizCo has a major dilemma on their hands: they have been approached with a lucrative military contract for their newly developed computer vision technology. Join us for a group role-playing game that simulates what happens when a fictional tech company faces a major question of ethics and a potential uprising from workers. Will management be able to save face amidst public scrutiny? Will workers choose to protest, strike, unionize – or all of the above? Apply the lessons from the teach-in to the real-world simulated world!
Friday, October 21st
Welcome! Zoom opens for mingling
7:30–8:00 AM PST
Welcome
TWC organizers
We will open up the Zoom room for half an hour to welcome everyone to day 3.
Organizing Through Oral Histories
8:00–8:50 AM PST
Skillshare Recorded
A workshop on how to conduct oral history interviews. We will go over the practical how-to’s of conducting oral history interviews. In addition, we will discuss the ethics of preserving people’s stories, how to steward interviews with care, and how to discuss consent with interviewees. Workshop leaders will also comment on the history of oral history as an organizing tool, tackling questions such as, what are the politics of oral history? How has oral history been taken up by activist movements?
Zine-making Workshop
9:00–9:50 AM PST
Skillshare
Learn how to make zines, and how zines can be a tool for building worker solidarity.
Break
Lightning Talks & Future Organizing
10:30 AM–12:30 PM PST
Closing CART Captions
TWC organizers
We’ll open with a grounding exercise, and then participants have an opportunity to share their reflections. Did you learn something new? Want to share a zine you made during the teach-in? Have a story to share about your work experience? Each speaker has up to 5 minutes to give a lightning talk about anything that inspires them. We’ll close with a co-reflection activity before closing out with an offer for future opportunities.
Presenters
Alex Ahmed
Wednesday, October 19. 10:00–10:50 AM PST
Alex Ahmed works at Sassafras Tech Collective, a worker-owned cooperative. She is a proud member of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW).
Alex Hanna
Tech Organizing Throughout the Decades
Thursday, October 20. 11:00–11:50 AM PST
Alex Hanna is Director of Research at the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR). A sociologist by training, her work centers on the data used in new computational technologies, and the ways in which these data exacerbate racial, gender, and class inequality.
Aline Os
Temps, Vendors & Contractors: Past and Present
Wednesday, October 19. 11:00–11:50 AM PST
Aline Os (Sao Paulo, Brazil) Graduated in Fine Arts, with a master's degree in Visual Poetics from the University of São Paulo, she is the founder of the cyclodelivery collective Señoritas Courier, composed of women and LGBTQIIA+ people. She is a cyclodeliverer and cycle activist. It collectively addresses the importance of digital inclusion to allow workers to take ownership of the means to develop solutions for decent work, with a view to Platform Cooperatives. For Señoritas, it is important to see workers as holistic beings with needs and wants beyond simply making deliveries, believing that the organization can also help solve other social problems, such as housing and access to healthcare.
ann haeyoung
Organizing Through Oral Histories
Friday, October 21. 8:00–8:50 AM PT
I'm an artist and former tech worker interested in technology and labor.
Ari Trujillo-John
Organizing at The Moment in History
Wednesday, October 19. 9:00–9:50 AM PST
Ari Trujillo-John (she / they) is the Co-Founder and CEO of OpenField, an organizing CRM that lets you manage all your organizing, including volunteers, in one place. With nearly 20 years of experience to her credit, she is a nationally recognized field director and engineer. She has been the National Director of Grassroots Power Building at the Sierra Club, Deputy National Data Director for the 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign, and Director of Data + Engineering for Wellstone Action, among others before co-founding OpenField. An alumni of the University of Texas at Austin, Ari is a non-binary, Afro-Xicana who hails from the East Side of San Jose.
Bogdana Rakova
The Lucas Plan: Transforming Industry Through Collective Action
Thursday, October 20. 9:00–9:50 AM PST
Bogdana is a Senior Trustworthy AI Fellow at Mozilla Foundation. She is an engineer, researcher, inventor, and organizer. Her work investigates the complex issues at the intersection of people, technology, trust, transparency, accountability, and social and environmental justice. Previously, she was a research manager at Accenture’s Responsible AI team, a mentor at the Assembly Ethics and Governance of AI program led by Harvard's Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, and has also held positions with Partnership on AI, Samsung Research America, and others. Her work weaves together inspirations from feminist studies and speculative fiction in building tangible hyperlocal prototypes.
Caroline Hunter
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Wednesday, October 19. 1:00–1:50 PM PST
Caroline Hunter, born and raised in segregated New Orleans, attended Xavier University Preparatory High School. Her story begins when her 10th grade history teacher introduced her to Apartheid by reading Cry the Beloved Country. Graduated from Xavier University of Louisiana in 1968, Hunter moved to Boston to work for Polaroid Corporation as a research chemist in the Color Labs. Hunter learned of Polaroid’s involvement in South Africa with Ken Williams, changing U.S. foreign policy and history. Hunter lives on Martha’s Vineyard and leads the Polar Bears, the seasonal historic African-American swim and water aerobics club.
David Bacon
Tech Organizing Throughout the Decades
Thursday, October 20. 11:00–11:50 AM PST
David Bacon is a California-based writer and photographer. He is the author of several books about labor and migration:. His latest book, of photographs and narratives about the Mexico/U.S. border, More Than a Wall/Mas que un muro, was just published by the Colegio de la Frontera Norte (Tijuana). Bacon was a factory worker in Silicon Valley and chairman of the United Electrical Workers Electronic Organizing Committee in the 1970s and 80s, and was a union organizer for many years. He is co-chair of Guild Freelancers, a unit of the Pacific Media Workers Guild, CWA/AFL-CIO.
Dave King
The Lucas Plan: Transforming Industry Through Collective Action
Thursday, October 20. 9:00–9:50 AM PST
Dave King did his PhD in molecular biology at Edinburgh University in the late 1980s and has been writing and campaigning on technology politics ever since. He was one of the founders of the campaign against genetically modified food in the UK, and since 2000 has been director of Human Genetics Alert. In 2013 he helped set up Breaking the Frame, and in 2016 was the main organizer of the conference on the fortieth anniversary of the Lucas Plan. He is a member of the New Lucas Plan working group.
Dorothy R. Santos
Building Solidarity Across Class and Race
Thursday, October 20. 10:00–10:50 AM PST
Dorothy R. Santos (she/they) is a Filipino American writer, artist, and educator whose academic and research interests include feminist media histories, critical medical anthropology, computational media, technology, race, and ethics. She is a Ph.D. candidate in Film and Digital Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz as a Eugene V. Cota-Robles fellow. Her work has been exhibited at Ars Electronica, Rewire Festival, Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and the GLBT Historical Society. She is a co-founder of REFRESH, a politically-engaged art and curatorial collective and serves as the Executive Director for the Processing Foundation.
Emerson Harris
Organizing at The Moment in History
Wednesday, October 19. 9:00–9:50 AM PST
Emerson Harris has been in the labor movement for 18 years. He has worked on many new organizing campaigns. In 2004 while in Boston, MA Emerson had the opportunity to stand with 350 subcontracted security workers who fought for 4 years to form their union and win their first ever contract at Harvard University. In 2008, after having just won the union and a contract with the security workers at Harvard, Emerson moved west to the Bay Area where he organized with public sector folks at Local 1000 SEIU. In 2010 Emerson moved to Seattle where he joined a newly formed Airport Workers’ organizing campaign. In 2012 the Seattle campaign effort took off - ultimately becoming the 1st ever demand for $15 dollars as a minimum wage and union rights for frontline workers. In 2012 Emerson headed back East taking on a role with 32BJ SEIU. In this new role Emerson was assigned to help lead an effort to organize 2,500 security workers in Northern New Jersey in their attempt to win union recognition. Shortly after winning union recognition for security workers in NJ, Emerson was then assigned to the New York Airports' campaign as the lead organizer. This new campaign focus was to win union rights for roughly 12,000 subcontracted passenger service workers at Laguardia, JFK and Newark airports. This effort ultimately led to 8,000 workers winning a union contract in phase 1 and over 40,000 front line passenger service workers winning a wage increase from what was a pay rate of $7.25 in 2014 to that off $19 to be phased in between 2018-2023. In his final 2 years at 32BJ Emerson led the Midtown District of 32BJ’s Commercial Division. During this time Emerson led a team of field reps who covered a turf of 12,000 janitorial workers who worked in over 300 Class A commercial office buildings throughout New York City. During this time Emerson led his team through a contract renewal fight and eventually what turned into the early days of the pandemic and mass New York City office building closures. Today, Emerson lives in Oakland and works in San Francisco at IFPTE Local 21 as the Organizing Director.
Emily Mazo
Best Practices for Remote Organizing
Thursday, October 20. 12:00–12:50 AM PST
Emily Mazo is a labor researcher and former software engineer, and a member of Collective Action in Tech.
Gabriel Schubiner
Wednesday, October 19. 1:00–1:50 PM PST
Gabriel Schubiner is a worker/researcher at Google and organizer with Alphabet Workers Union. They organize against all tech-military contracts and are a core organizer of the #NoTechForApartheid campaign which focuses on dismantling Project Nimbus, the contract between Google, Amazon, and the Israeli government and military.
J. Khadijah Abdurahman
Zines and Material Culture in Tech Organizing
Thursday, October 20. 7:00–7:50 AM PST
J. Khadijah Abdurahman (they/them/any) is an abolitionist whose research focus is predictive risk modeling in the New York City child welfare system and tech in the Horn of Africa. They are the incoming Editor in Chief of Logic(s) Magazine, a UCLA C2I2 Fellow and the founder of We Be Imagining, a public interest technology project at Columbia University’s INCITE Center. Khadijah co-founded the Otherwise School: Tools and Techniques of Counter-Fascism alongside Sucheta Ghoshal’s Inquilab at the University of Washington, HCDE
Joan Greenbaum
Tech organizing throughout the decades
Thursday, October 20. 11:00–11:50 AM PT
Joan Greenbaum began as a programmer at IBM in the 1960s and quickly became involved in Computer People for Peace. As a collective we were a consistent part of anti war events and routinely published the newsletter Interrupt. We also go involved in trying to organize a computer workers union as well as supplying support for the Black Panthers, in particular Clark Squire who was a NASA programmer. Squire, known as Sundiata Acoli was just released from prison; one of the longest servicing and elderly political prisoners in the US.
Kathy Zhang
Best Practices for Remote Organizing
Thursday, October 20. 12:00–12:50 PM PT
Kathy Zhang is a rank-and-file union member and unit chair at The New York Times Tech Guild. Kathy has a decade of experience in data analytics and has been working at the Times for 7 years, mostly on the audience analytics team in the newsroom. She's been involved in organizing the Times tech union since the beginning and is excited to share the experiences of the Times Tech campaign with other tech workers!
Kristen Sheets
Ethics on the Job: A Tech Worker’s Role in Upholding Values in Computing Systems
Thursday, October 20. 2:00–3:30 PM PT
Kristen Sheets is a programmer, working in the domain of machine learning and computational linguistics. A long-time member of the Tech Workers Coalition community, she currently is focused on building out projects with Collective Action in Tech.
Marceline Donaldson
Building Solidarity Across Class and Race
Thursday, October 20. 10:00–10:50 AM PST
I started life in New Orleans, LA to a family of people to whom the struggle to be equal in a society which had separate water fountains and everything else was a minute by minute lifestyle.
That broke when I started college at Xavier University, Dillard University, New York University where I majored in Math with a Physics minor and worked with Dr. Bazer at Courant Institute to solve Magneto-Hydrodynamics Equations for the first time - an African American woman in that position for the first time. On to the University of Minnesota's Graduate School of Architecture under Ralph Rapson - the only woman in that place and on to Harvard Graduate School of Business in their Executive Program where there were two women - both African Americans who followed one woman in the prior session who was white and the first woman accepted into that program. From there to Episcopal Divinity School in Boston where I was a postulant for ordination and team taught a course on "Genesis: A Paradigm for Human Relationships" and Racism and the Church. I went on to Boston University School of Theology where there were many minorities and for the first time I was not the first or only one fighting to be acknowledged as a whole, equal person which means fighting the society's need to have one group better than and others on different levels under that one group. Along the way in between all of that education I worked for Dain, Kalman & Quail in Minneapolis as a stockbroker; Founded Ma-Li-Kai, Inc., an antiques gallery and Interior Design Studio plus many others including the current company my husband and I co-founded in the 1980's - Bettina Network, Inc. which we hope to continue to be able to help create "a world where we all can live with dignity and self-determination" and which weighs in on and helps turn around the attempt of this society's move towards ever larger corporations which hold up a handful of white northern european males in charge and receiving all the money from the creation and work of everyone else. In other words, instead of working to advance this society's creation of ever different forms of slavery to work towards a world where we are all free, equal and living our best lives benefitting from our talents, etc.
In civil rights I was on the National Board of NOW in the 1970's; coordinated a boycott against General Mills which brought together NOW and the National Urban League; brought IBM to the National Labor Relations Board about the time Reagan was becoming president and on it goes.
Marcus Courtney
Best Practices for Remote Organizing
Thursday, October 20. 12:00–12:50 PM PT
Marcus Courtney co-founded the nation’s first union dedicated to representing high-technology workers (WashTech/CWA) and spent five years overseas directing negotiations and political efforts on behalf of national unions on four continents. He has testified before the U.S. Congress. Marcus has been widely quoted in the media by the New York Times, NPR, The Seattle Times, network TV and in foreign publications. His opinion pieces on the future of work have been published in The Seattle Times, Crosscut, the Korean Labor Institute, and Washington Monthly. He recently served on the Innovation and Jobs Policy Committee for the Biden presidential campaign, and Washington State Future of Work Commission. Marcus lives in Seattle where he works as an independent public affairs consultant.
Michelle Rodino-Colocino
Best Practices for Remote Organizing
Thursday, October 20. 12:00–12:50 PM PT
Michelle Rodino-Colocino is an Associate Professor of Media Studies in the Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications at Penn State University where she has taught for the past 15 years. She is affiliate faculty in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and the Rock Ethics Institute in the College of Liberal Arts. Previously she was Assistant Professor of Communication at University of Cincinnati. Michelle’s research, teaching, service, activism, and creative works span feminist media and critical cultural studies, with special interest in labor, new media, and social movements. Michelle has published over over 50 scholarly journal articles, book chapters, and essays in leading communications journals and outlets for public scholarship. Michelle is Co-editor of The Gig Economy: Workers and Media in the Age of Convergence with Brian Dolber, Chenjerai Kumanyika, and Todd Wolfson. Michelle earned her Ph.D. in Communication from the University of Pittsburgh, M.A. in Communication from Northwestern University, and B.A. in Political Science from UCLA. As a scholar-organizer, she has worked with organizing app-based drivers and tech workers, including WashTech (the Washington Alliance of Technology Workers) with TWC Teach-In co-panelist Marcus Courtney. Michelle serves as the president of the Penn State chapter of AAUP (American Association of University Professor) and is co-founder and faculty adviser for Survivors and Allies United.
Nataliya Nedzhvetskaya
Ethics on the Job: A Tech Worker’s Role in Upholding Values in Computing Systems
Thursday, October 20. 2:00–3:30 PM PT
Nataliya Nedzhvetskaya (she/her) is a Ph.D. student at the University of California, Berkeley in Sociology. Her dissertation examines employee activism in U.S. corporations from 1960 to the present-day, drawing connections between informal, ethics-oriented activism and formal unionization. Since 2019, she has been an archivist at Collective Action in Tech. Her research has been featured in The Guardian, MIT Technology Review, NBC News, NPR, The LA Times, TIME, and other publications.
Phil Asquith
The Lucas Plan: Transforming Industry Through Collective Action
Thursday, October 20. 9:00–9:50 AM PT
Phil Asquith has been closely involved with the Lucas Plan since its conception in 1974 and has spoken at numerous conferences and events in the U.K., US and mainland Europe. He is a Chartered Mechanical Engineer and was Chairman of the Lucas Aerospace Combine Shop Stewards’ Committee at the Burnley U.K. site. Phil and a handful of surviving Combine comrades tell the detailed story of the Lucas Plan in the three hour documentary film ‘The Plan - that came from the bottom up’.
R.K. Upadhya
Wednesday, October 19. 10:00–10:50 AM PT
R.K. Upadhya is an engineer in the energy & resources sector, currently working in the electric utility industry in Texas. He was involved with Tech Workers Coalition in the San Francisco Bay Area between 2016 and 2019. Find him on Twitter at @rk__upadhya.
Dr. Richard Hudson
Zines and Material Culture in Tech Organizing
Thursday, October 20. 7:00–7:50 AM PST
I was hired by IBM in 1983 after graduating from RCA Institute. Over a 17 years tenure, I worked as an Electronic Technician, Electronic Engineer, Programmer, System Analyst, Staff Instructor, Course Manager, Database Designer and Implementer, and Personnel Specialist. While working at IBM, I earned a B.A. in Physic (Marist College), M.S. in Sociology (The New School) and Ph. D. in Sociology (City University of New York). I have two patents for inventions. I previously lost a federal suit in 1978 in which I charged that IBM Performance Appraisal system was “subjective and discriminatory.” In this case, the several judges simply ignored those facts I presented and accepted IBM facts as determinative in the case. In May, 1980, I was terminated for distributing IBM Confidential Salary data to other employees. Amazingly, I lost the case, which the judge admitted that I had a protected Section 8 right to distribute the data but ruled in favor of IBM’s right to maintain salary data as IBM Confidential. In the ruling, the judge did not cite any legal basis for the determination that IBM’s right to maintain a confidential salary system superseded my Section 8 right. Notwithstanding these outcomes, I consider both as “badges of honor.” In 1980, I was hired by Mercy College and retired in 2005. For the last fifteen years I have been teaching as an adjunct for Mercy College.
This is a photo when I was about 30.
Shaik Salauddin
Temps, Vendors & Contractors: Past and Present
Wednesday, October 19. 11:00–11:50 AM PST
Shaik Salauddin is a Uber driver and union leader based in Hyderabad, India. He has been working to surface and ameliorate the working conditions of Indian gig and platform workers in two capacities: as the President and Founder of the Telangana Gig and Platform Workers Union (TGPWU), which was established in 2021 in Telangana state in South India; and, as the General Secretary of the Indian Federation of App-based Transport Workers (IFAT), which is a pan-India federation comprising numerous unions. Shaik has worked on a variety of TGPWU and IFAT campaigns, such as advocating for the inclusion of gig workers in a new social security scheme (e-shram), and coordinating collective actions like the ‘No AC campaign’ and ‘Swiggy logout strike’ which targeted companies’ exploitative practices.
Shannon O’Neil
Organizing Through Oral Histories
Friday, October 21. 8:00–8:50 AM PT
Shannon O'Neill is the curator for the Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives at NYU Special Collections. She joined NYU in August of 2019. Prior to NYU, she worked at the Barnard College Archives and Special Collections, the Los Angeles Public Library, and the Atlantic City Free Public Library.
Srujana Katta
Temps, Vendors & Contractors: Past and Present
Wednesday, October 19. 11:00–11:50 AM PST
Srujana is a PhD student at the University of Oxford’s Internet Institute. Her PhD project is a collaborative ethnography of ride-hail work and labour organising in partnership with the Telangana Gig and Platform Workers Union (TGPWU), in the South Indian city of Hyderabad, India. The project aims to support Hyderabad’s app-based ride-hail workers by: (1) raising awareness among them about the extant forms of labour organising and support for workers, (2) identifying the vulnerabilities they face and their aspirations for their working lives, and (3) creating a pipeline for their concerns and visions to feed into TGPWU’s strategies and actions. Srujana is passionate about supporting and building community-based interventions and movements for just, equitable, and representative technological futures.
Steven Pitts
Organizing at The Moment in History
Wednesday, October 19. 9:00–9:50 AM PST
Steven Pitts recently retired from the UC Berkeley Labor Center where for 19 years he focused on leadership development and Black worker issues.
Steven came to the Labor Center in August of 2001 from Houston, Texas. He received his Ph.D. in economics with an emphasis on urban economics from the University of Houston in 1994. His master’s degree is also from the University of Houston and he holds a bachelor’s degree from Harvard University. For the 15 years prior to his arrival at the Labor Center, Steven taught economics at Houston Community College and, for 5 years, he was an adjunct lecturer in the African American Studies Program at the University of Houston. At the Labor Center, Steven focused on issues of job quality and Black workers. In this arena, he published reports on employment issues in the Black community, initiated a Black union leadership school, and shaped projects designed to build solidarity between Black and Latino immigrant workers. Especially in his later years at the Labor Center, a major area of his work involved providing technical assistance to efforts in developing Black worker centers around the country.
Since his retirement from the Labor Center, Steven created and hosts the podcast Black Work Talk, which looks at the struggles to build Black workers’ collective power and to challenge racial capitalism.
Thiago Maeda
Temps, Vendors & Contractors: Past and Present
Wednesday, October 19. 11:00–11:50 AM PST
Thiago Maeda is an advisor for CUT Brazil, the biggest trade union center in Latin America, for workers in the platform economy both at national and international level. He works with research and policy formulation on the topic, as well as training and organizing workers on digital labor platforms.
Tiny Tech Zines
Thursday, October 21. 9:00–9:50 AM PST
Tiny Tech Zines (TTZ) is a tech zine fair and collective. Our work emphasizes care and centers relationships between marginalized communities and technology. We organize as guests in Tovaangar (so-called Los Angeles). Together we feel for the nuances of digital tech's presence in our worlds. We define "technology" very openly as anything that beings have made/are making/will make.
Udayan Tandon
Temps, Vendors & Contractors: Past and Present
Wednesday, October 19. 11:00–11:50 AM PST
Udayan Tandon is a Ph.D. Student at UC San Diego’s Just Transitions Initiative and Design Lab. He believes that if HCI and computing have to achieve its goals of ethics, justice, inclusivity, and equity, then we need to take political agency and community power building seriously. Most of his current work, research, and teaching capacities are in service of that. He works in collaboration with United Taxi Workers of San Diego (UTWSD), an immigrant-led taxi worker advocacy organization, to create an alternative platform for dignified driving work. His work here is not to design or build per sé, but rather to co-investigate with UTWSD the possible configurations of socio-technical infrastructures that are accountable to drivers and the broader communities who are typically excluded from technological visions.
Veena Dubal
Temps, Vendors & Contractors: Past and Present
Wednesday, October 19. 11:00–11:50 AM PST
Professor Veena Dubal’s research focuses on the intersection of law, technology, and precarious work. Within this broad frame, she uses empirical methodologies and critical theory to understand (1) the impact of digital technologies and emerging legal frameworks on the lives of workers, (2) the co-constitutive influences of law and work on identity, and (3) the role of law and lawyers in solidarity movements.
Professor Dubal has been cited by the California Supreme Court, and her scholarship has been published in top-tier law review and peer-reviewed journals, including the California Law Review, Wisconsin Law Review, Berkeley Journal of Empirical and Labor Law, and Perspectives on Politics. Based on over a decade of ethnographic and historical study, Professor Dubal is currently writing a manuscript (Driving Freedom, Navigating Neoliberalism) on how five decades of shifting technologies and emergent regulatory regimes changed the everyday lives and work experiences of ride-hail drivers in San Francisco.
Professor Dubal joined the Hastings Faculty in 2015, after a post-doctoral fellowship at Stanford University (also her undergraduate alma mater). Prior to that, Professor Dubal received her J.D. and Ph.D. from UC Berkeley, where she conducted an ethnography of the San Francisco taxi industry. The subject of her doctoral research arose from her work as a public interest attorney and Berkeley Law Foundation fellow at the Asian Law Caucus where she founded a taxi worker project and represented Muslim Americans in civil rights cases.
Willy Solis
Temps, Vendors & Contractors: Past and Present
Wednesday, October 19. 11:00–11:50 AM PST
Willy Solis is a Texas based gig worker. He experienced firsthand how these companies are exploiting workers and began organizing Shipt shoppers in January 2020. He is currently a lead organizer with Gig Workers Collective. Willy believes gig work is real work, and workers deserve fair treatment and pay.
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