Hubbers working to make a better future for all workers at GitHub.
Joined August 2021
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We need to get OR-GA-NIZED. We can't wait until WE PERSONALLY are on the chopping block! 10% is 10% too many! We fight together, or we get fired separately!
Our hearts go out to our friends at Twitter, who now live under the threat of a massive round of firing. This situation demonstrates that tech workers are just as vulnerable to the whims of capitalists as anyone else. We need unions so badly.
git pull union retweeted
Google contractors wanted to go on strike, AWU offered strike fund, they were all set to start tomorrow, within hours of letting management know, management backed down. To "organize big tech" we only need relatively small # of workers to be in the union to have a huge impact.
Does GitHub support abortion rights? Does GitHub care about its workers access to safe and necessary healthcare? Put your money where your DI&B mouth is, and guarantee that all Hubbers who need abortions will have the resources to get them.
The only way for tech workers to have a REAL 8 hour work day, where we're not pressured by explicit and implicit forces to stretch ourselves thin, is if we can fight for it. Not individually, asking pointed questions in town hall meetings, but with worker power. With a UNION.
The tech industry doesn't destroy us like working at in coal mine does, and we're fortunate for that. But it takes its own toll. It can rob us of our physical and mental health, burn us up. And when we finally are all burnt out, we're just replaced.
And then there's the more unethical behavior of some companies: pushing employees to get prescriptions for modafinil or amphetamines to keep them going on 4 hours sleep, or to pull all-nighter after all-nighter.
Typically, none of this is compensated, no one gets overtime for working super later, or for being on the clock 24 hours a day for a week or two or three, and yet it's expected. At best, we get subscriptions to commodity health care to "heal" us after the damage is done.
And then there's on call, when tech workers are expected to spend extended periods of time on the clock, able to be woken up in the middle of the night, dragged away from dinner, from watching a movie.
In pre-pandemic times, your work life blended into your home life because of course you had phones and laptops with you, meaning you were always able to be contacted, and functionally never off work. Remote work during the pandemic has exacerbated this to an extreme.
The tech industry is notorious for it's excessive work hours. 9-to-5 seems like an impossible dream to many, with the work day ending closer to 6, 7, 8, even 9 or later, never mind crunch mode.
Despite laws and regulations that define an 8 hour work day, despite the 9-to-5 standard, many industries today still struggle to actually have an 8 hour work day. Corporations use all sorts of tactics, from off-the-books work, to extensive overtime, to go well beyond 8 hours.
Happy International Workers' Day, aka May Day! Did you know? May Day originated as a commemoration of the Haymarket Affair, a show trial of 8 anarchists (7 eventually executed) who were part of a rally in support of workers striking for an 8 hour work day.
Etsy abolished location-based pay grades, Airbnb is now abolishing them too. GitHub must follow suit! Equalize pay and start giving raises to Hubbers in lower cost-of-living areas, their work is just as valuable!
Airbnb just announced its new remote work policy for its employees.
As someone who has lived in airbnbs the last two years, here are the lines that stood out to me the most… 🧵
news.airbnb.com/airbnbs-desi…
We've been informed that this doesn't necessarily work on MacOS using command line tools. Not entirely sure why that should be the case, since MacOS's tools like sha256sum tend to be consistent with other tools. Curious.
Why not just say something in the internal Slack, or confirm our identities? Because union busting exists, and people get fired all the time for organizing. Just look at the Fired Five at Google. OpSec can't win us a union, but it can help us organize more safely.
Why use this method of verification? A few reasons. Firstly, it demonstrates we have some privileged access to the internal Slack. But why hash it? Because even though it's not all that sensitive, we don't want to publicly disclose that information.
If you did the above, you should get the same string of letters and numbers we posted above (0376d6...).