Dos IWW às lutas na Google e na Uber

The Radical Guidebook Embraced by Google Workers and Uber Drivers (New York Times):

Just before 20,000 Google employees left their desks last fall to protest the company’s handling of sexual harassment, a debate broke out among the hundreds of workers involved in formulating a list of demands. (...)

But the argument that gained the upper hand, especially as the debate escalated in the weeks after the walkout, held that those approaches would be futile, according to two people involved. Those who felt this way contended that only a less formal, worker-led organization could succeed, by waging mass resistance or implicitly threatening to do so.

This view, based on century-old ideas, did not emerge in a vacuum. It can be traced in part to a book called “Labor Law for the Rank and Filer,” which many Googlers had read and discussed.

Its authors are a longtime labor historian, Staughton Lynd, and an organizer, Daniel Gross. They identify with a strain of unionism popularized in the early 1900s by the Industrial Workers of the World (...)

And Googlers aren’t the only ones who have drawn inspiration from the book. Workers at the crowdfunding company Kickstarter, the site of a recent union campaign, have studied it. Organizers with one of the largest Uber driver groups say the ideas have influenced them as well.

Ares Geovanos, a longtime volunteer for the Tech Workers Coalition, which seeks to organize workers across the industry, said the book’s key contention — that a dedicated group of employees can accomplish more through actions like strikes than by formal efforts to certify a union — had gained traction partly because it reflects reality: Most tech workers have traditionally been reluctant to organize.

A situação nos EUA é bastante diferente da portuguesa (p.ex., lá os sindicatos são certificados oficialmente, por votação, como representantes legais dos trabalhadores de dada profissão e/ou empresa), mas apesar de tudo essas organizações informais não-certificadas parecem-me ter algum paralelismo com o aparecimento cá de sindicatos não alinhados com as centrais sindicais (como os motoristas de matérias perigosas, os enfermeiros ou o Sindicato de Todos Os Professores), e que nalguns casos (nomeadamente os enfermeiros e o STOP) parecem por vezes funcionar menos como organizações estruturadas e mais como simples siglas para dar cobertura jurídica a greves largamente self-service feitas por trabalhadores quem nem sequer estão neles filiados.

Ver o meu post de maio,Um espectro assombra o mundo, o espectro das greves.