Recoding Power: Tactics for Mobilizing Tech Workers
Sidney A. Rothstein
MPIfG Book
Abstract
This book outlines tactics that workers can use to build power in the current episode of economic transition. As rich capitalist democracies increasingly embrace digital transformation as a strategy to drive economic growth, policymakers have dismantled labor’s traditional power-resources — especially institutions for social protection and the unions that support and enforce them — leaving workers on their own to defend against rising economic inequality and spreading precarity. Moreover, with the ascendance of financialization, managers have adopted the discourse of market fundamentalism, which is particularly effective at persuading workers that building power is impossible. Recoding Power draws on four in-depth case studies of mass layoffs at tech firms in the United States and Germany to show how workers can develop creative tactics to “recode” management’s discursive techniques for control, transforming them from obstacles into resources for collective action. When workers put workplace discourse at the center of their tactics for mobilizing, they can develop the strategic capacity and economic leverage necessary to defend against the threat of job loss. Foregrounding workers’ lived experiences in the workplace, Recoding Power develops an account of actually existing digital transformation that illustrates how the path of capitalist development is shaped not by economic necessity, but by political creativity.
Contents
Chapter 1. Actually Existing Digital Transformation
Chapter 2. Worker Power in Twenty-First-Century Capitalism
Part I Mass Layoffs in the United States: Worker Power and the Discourse of Market Fundamentalism
Chapter 3. Economic Transition in the Workplace: Resistance at IBM Burlington
Chapter 4. Market Power is Not Enough: Acquiescence at IBM San Jose
PART II Mass Layoffs in Germany: Digital Transformation in a Robust Institutional Environment
Chapter 5. Institutions by the Wayside: Acquiescence at Infineon
Chapter 6. Counterhegemonic Tactics: Resistance at Siemens
Chapter 7. The Power of Recoding
