Solidarity across the platform: mobilizing high-wage and low-wage workers in the tech sector

What strategies and tactics allow workers to build solidarity in 21st century capitalism? Skill-biased technical change and globalization have polarized labour markets across the Global North, leading scholars to view a fractured working class as a defining feature of contemporary capitalism. This article reaches a different conclusion. Tracing three cases of high-wage tech workers mobilizing on behalf of low-wage workers in the US, this article shows how workers can develop counterhegemonic tactics to transform management’s discourse into resources for inclusive labour solidarity. At Google, WeWork, and Amazon, workers extended management’s invocation of tech’s founding norms in order to build solidarity across three types of structural boundaries that otherwise divided workers: status, occupation, and the firm. These case studies illustrate how working-class solidarity is still possible despite the challenges entailed by the contemporary structure of production. The growing dominance of the tech sector reinforces divisions among workers but also offers possibilities for workers to build solidarity across those divisions by articulating a collective identity that extends their ethical commitments.