Last week, federal contractor Akima fired employee Juli Briskman for flipping the bird to the presidential motorcade as she rode her bicycle around her Northern Virginia neighborhood. Her firing came not long after a contractor, just finishing his last day at Twitter, deactivated President Trump’s Twitter feed. (It was restored 11 minutes later.)
In response, whistleblower Edward Snowden, formerly employed by the consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton and now the most important subcontracted worker of our time, tweeted, “Never underestimate the power of a worker with a conscience.”
The Twitter Quitter, Briskman and Snowden all share one thing in common: They were subcontractors for technology firms. These high-profile instances of employee defiance point to a larger trend within the American labor experience, one that has major implications in every facet of our lives — subcontracting workers.
The technology industry has often praised subcontracting by arguing that it helps workers shape their own schedule, or provides an inexpensive and straightforward way to launch entrepreneurial endeavors.
At the same time, however, subcontracted work is also a deeply unpredictable and stressful form of labor. As staffing firms have proliferated, and digital companies like Airbnb and Uber have made it much easier to find work moonlighting, the predominance and expectations of such forms of employment have made it much harder to find a good job with regular pay, predictable hours and workplace rights.
Subcontracting is essentially “fee-for-service” work, in which companies contract with outside firms to provide a specific type of labor. This middleman is then in charge of finding, training and overseeing workers for that business. The primary company pays only for the precise labor it needs from those workers — not for the true costs of providing a fair and protected workplace.
Silicon Valley corporations depend on this practice because it is far cheaper to employ a subcontracted worker than to directly employ someone who has defined workplace rights and negotiating power, receives benefits and is directly protected by state and federal labor laws. Subcontracting forces many of the costs of employing workers onto the workers themselves.
This practice absolves the business benefiting from that work from any risk associated with it.
The use of subcontractors makes it hard to hold the primary business legally responsible when workers are hurt on the job or wages go unpaid. Through subcontracting, companies like Twitter avoid the cost of keeping workers’ bodies healthy and able to work with health insurance and safe workplaces. They can turn the other way when faced with the disastrous health and environmental implications of tech production — everything from repetitive stress injuries to leukemia, from water pollution to coal consumption. Cutting these costs at the expense of workers is precisely what makes subcontracting so profitable and attractive for corporations.
High tech was one of the first industries to subcontract most of its necessary operations. From the earliest days of the Silicon Valley, almost every major technology company has relied on contract employees.
This has historical roots. The Santa Clara Valley, now home to the Silicon Valley, featured a largely agricultural economy before it became a technology hub. As the technology industry grew, it absorbed the permanent class of often-subcontracted agricultural workers, who were primarily women and people of color that had worked in the region’s orchards and canneries.
These workers and their families became the new, subcontracted labor force that supported tech’s manufacturing and service needs throughout the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. Despite many efforts, major unions were seldom able to organize technology firms that were not connected with the military, and as those nonmilitary sectors of the tech industry grew to be the majority of the industry, so did the practice of subcontracting.
By the 1970s, subcontractors were building most of high tech’s semiconductors and motherboards, disposing its chemical and industrial wastes, and managing its buildings and grounds. While its roots are in the Silicon Valley, this practice has become the norm for the technology industry internationally: Subcontracted workers build hardware outside Shenzhen and Kuala Lumpur, take phone calls in Bangalore and clean offices in New York. Over the past 30 years, this practice has increased across the board in military and government sectors as well.
From the early days of Silicon Valley to the present, subcontracting has made unionization especially difficult. Since the 1960s, any whiff of a unionizing workforce in a subcontracted shop has meant that the contracting company will simply fire the subcontracting firm and all its employees. Employees, in turn, have no recourse, because their rights to union activity are protected only under the terms of their employment with the subcontractor, not the company in charge.
With secondary strikes and boycotts illegal under the National Labor Relations Act, applying direct pressure to the primary business is thus incredibly difficult. Left to the whims of their employers with minimal leverage, subcontracted workers confront precarious conditions and find themselves vulnerable to termination. Losing a job over union activity could result in long-term unemployment.
This problem is only growing worse. From content moderators who work to scrub the Internet of its worst dregs, to writers in digital media, to the TaskRabbits who clean Airbnbs for absentee landlords, subcontracting is all around us — and in increasing numbers. This precarious workforce grew three times faster than the American workforce overall in 2014, and by 2027, some estimate, the majority of the workforce — white collar, blue collar, green and pink collar — will be freelance.
So what can be done? Increasing workers’ control over their labor and their lives is the first step toward demanding accountability from these massive corporate entities. Workers must harness the inherent power they possess in the workplace. That means fighting to protect the precious few unions we have, joining and starting them ourselves, reversing laws against secondary boycotts, protecting unions in the courts on the federal level, supporting movements and ballot initiatives for higher minimum wages and making sure all workers have robust and ongoing health care, no matter who employs them or how they are employed.
Subcontracted and directly employed workers also need to band together to push back against the particular vulnerability that subcontracted workers experience. Doing so will boost the power of directly employed workers as well.
What is good for contract workers is also good for all users of digital and social media and data-collection services. People like Snowden revealed that the U.S. government was illegally collecting all of our communications without our knowledge. The Twitter Quitter highlighted that the president was using a corporate social media platform to craft policy. Empowered workers, by exercising democratic control in the workplace, will strengthen our weakening democratic practices.
Workers offer us our best chance for safeguarding public debates and democratic processes on and off the Internet. Although Snowden’s sacrifices are surely on a different order of magnitude than those of Briskman and the Twitter Quitter, if they can do it, we can all do it — especially because these workers were so precariously employed.
After all, their solo acts of resistance would have been less risky had they been protected by unions. When workers are organized in unions, they do not need to act alone to take a stance — they can choose to do so together. And if the union does take a stance, one person is less likely to be singled out and fired, because the decision was a collective one.
Imagine what we could do if everyone had safe, secure employment, defined by control over their labor, their working conditions and daily operations. Never underestimate the power of a worker with a conscience.
