For several years now, many companies and offices around the world have in common a tool that has become essential for organizing work activities and managing communication between employees: the Slack business collaboration software, which allows groups of people to less busy exchanging messages and information and coordinating their activities quickly and informally.
Recently, American newspapers and specialized sites have begun to talk about how Slack and other similar platforms have also become new spaces available to male and female workers to discuss problems related to their companies or to organize themselves at a trade union level, especially in the technology sector. and in that of new services. It is a relevant phenomenon not only because in the United States trade unions are much less rooted than in European countries, when not entirely absent, but also because it is part of a wider phenomenon of greater participation and sensitivity of the new generations to issues related to civil rights. , including those at work.
Of the business collaboration software, Slack is becoming the most popular. It is based on a series of channels organized by topic, public or private, in which people or work groups communicate by chatting, in a simpler way than a round of email or a chain of phone calls. And in a more practical and functional way than other similar platforms. Slack works from both desktop and phone and promotes interaction in various ways, such as a social network: you can use emojis and comment on other messages, you can share photos, videos and links, and among other things you can make phone calls and video calls.
It has existed since 2014 and over time has become one of the main communication platforms used daily by companies such as Airbnb and Deliveroo, and by newspapers such as the New York Times and Atlantic (as well as the post). Politicians, universities, non-profit organizations use it, and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory also uses it. At the end of October, when whistleblower and former Facebook employee Frances Haugen had provided several internal company documents – the so-called “Facebook Papers” – to various American newspapers, journalists from the various newspapers had gathered in an informal consortium over a chat by Slack.
The same name, “slack”, which can be translated as “wasting time” or “sluggish, slow, lazy”, winks at the type of informal communication and sensitivity relaxed corporate identity that has particularly spread to large US tech companies. Moreover, this phenomenon has not only been interpreted with enthusiastic tones, but also worried ones: in fact, for some time now it has been reflected on how these new corporate communication methods are more invasive than traditional emails in the life outside the office of employees. In the words of Atlantic, which addressed the subject in a lengthy article, Slack is “work software that has crept into our lives exactly because it doesn't look like work software.”
Slack, continues Atlantic, is in fact a space in which we talk about this and that and the corporate culture is formed: an environment that has replaced the chat from one desk to another or the coffee break, especially during the coronavirus pandemic, and which in many cases has also become a space to communicate their malaise, collect complaints or carry out common initiatives, such as unionizing.
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One of the advantages of business collaboration software is that potentially everyone is on an equal footing and has the ability to express their opinions in a very horizontal way, from bosses to interns, with the result that employees have an extra tool to make their opinions heard. dissent or ask for more protections.
In June, when news broke that the entertainment and news site BuzzFeed would go public via a SPAC, more than a thousand company employees found themselves on Slack's #aja channel, an acronym for “Ask Jonah anything”, ” ask Jonah what you want ”, to ask CEO Jonah Peretti for more transparency and understand why the news reached the newspapers earlier than them. In 2020, however, there were extensive protests on the New York Times #standards channel, citing “serious concerns in the newsroom” because of an article by Republican Senator Tom Cotton hosted by the newspaper. As a result of the article, in which Cotton called on then-US President Donald Trump to “use the military” to contain protests from the Black Lives Matter movement, at least two chief editors had subsequently resigned, Atlantic said.
An example of how Slack was used to ask for more protections concerns a project of the startup Andela, which is based in New York and from 2014 to 2019 recruited and trained engineers from various African countries and then send them to work in large international companies. Slack was the most convenient software for people participating in the program to communicate with each other, and it was through Slack that in 2019 some of them had circulated a petition asking for higher wages, after discovering that about a third were paid of what the client companies paid Andela for their recruitment. The program was closed at the end of 2019.
And the Slack Party is on @Andela_Kenya @Andela_Nigeria @googleafrica @udacity #ALCwithGoogle pic.twitter.com/BU6nOppcE0
– Cheruto (@Cheruto_Cheruto) May 11, 2018
However, this phenomenon does not exclusively concern Slack. About 600 Apple employees use AppleConnect software, launched on Discord's server in 2018, a chat and video calling app that was initially popular with video game enthusiasts and became popular in others to communicate and discuss what's wrong. areas. The technology magazine Protocol explained that AppleConnect was born from some technicians outside the company who had created it to discuss problems related to work, and today it is also used within the company to share information and work strategies together. frustrations, gossip and so on.
Amazon, on the other hand, has always been against the formation of a union among its employees, and at the beginning of the year it had tried in various ways to hinder the campaign of those who had tried to form one in Alabama. On the social network Reddit, however, various groups of Amazon workers can anonymously discuss the notoriously difficult working conditions they are subjected to, and in some cases have helped people who were starting to work for the company to understand in what kind of environment they were about to slip into, Protocol says.
Legally in the United States, companies cannot prevent union formation, and in some circumstances they can control the private messages that users exchange on corporate software. Some in fact blocked groups that tried to tackle trade union issues on the pretext that work tools should not be used for purposes other than purely working ones. For example, in August, Apple shut down a channel in which various employees were discussing wage disparities, citing that Slack was to be used for business things, according to the rules set by the company; the channels in which, for example, dogs or video games were talked about, remained regularly open.
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Meredith Whittaker, a member of the board of directors of the company that runs the Signal messaging app and a former Google collaborator, told Protocol that until a few years ago the idea that big tech companies could unionize was considered ludicrous.
The birth of unions within the American technology industry is historically frowned upon because many companies, despite having tens of thousands of employees and a large hierarchy, continue to see themselves as agile and creative startups, for which unions are a burden. and a slowdown. In addition, until recently, it seemed particularly difficult to think that a union could meet the different needs of temporary workers and engineers or programmers, who have very different salaries and working conditions.
In recent times, however, new trade unions have been created to protect the rights of employees: some have been created within large technological companies, others instead bring together those who work occasionally and flexibly in companies of the so-called “gig economy”, or those which rely on new technologies to offer services such as food delivery and transportation. Between January and February, for example, the Alphabet Workers Union, the internal union of the company that controls Google, and that of the computer company Glitch were born. Then there is Gig Workers Rising, a group that unites among others the drivers of Uber and Lyft, the companies that offer a service that is halfway between that of a taxi and a rental with driver.
