Huh, I honestly had no idea, thank you! I’ll certainly start looking into it! Perfect timing, too, quit my job so I could focus on trying to get into stuff like this!
I sure hope the fact that it isn’t common knowledge (at least not among most of the people with whom I’ve worked during the past decade) is down to them being effective and not it being a hopeless cause, though… Speaking from personal experience (and I leave room for doubt because I have notoriously bad luck in general), it sure didn’t feel all that grand working in this industry. Not about the work in itself, but the practices…
Pretty much anywhere outside the USA, the communication of tech workers unionizing is pretty much absent and expecially news about it. This is a big deal, but it doesn’t say much about the actual penetration of unions in a given sector. It’s a complex topic, but I explain it with the fact that the topic is pretty much uninteresting, unless it’s a well-known brand is unionizing. Since most famous tech companies are American, there’s enough mass of news there to actually push media outlets to cover news.
In Italy, where there are very few “well-known” IT companies, the topic is completely absent, to the point where IT union organizers from a city don’t know about big wins by other IT unions organizers from another city. Nonetheless the narrative is not the thing, and there can be big impacts that become visible to the general public only after sociological studies.
So, long-story short, the fact you never heard about SITT doesn’t say much about its effectiveness, just about their ability to communicate.
Are you aware that Romanian IT sector has the highest rate of unionization of any IT sector in the world? SITT is a case study studied all over the world. https://transform-network.net/blog/interview/the-romanian-it-workers-labour-union-showed-that-everyone-can/
It might not be the sexiest, most modern radical union, but it is a case of success with numbers to show. Maybe you can start from there.
Huh, I honestly had no idea, thank you! I’ll certainly start looking into it! Perfect timing, too, quit my job so I could focus on trying to get into stuff like this!
I sure hope the fact that it isn’t common knowledge (at least not among most of the people with whom I’ve worked during the past decade) is down to them being effective and not it being a hopeless cause, though… Speaking from personal experience (and I leave room for doubt because I have notoriously bad luck in general), it sure didn’t feel all that grand working in this industry. Not about the work in itself, but the practices…
Pretty much anywhere outside the USA, the communication of tech workers unionizing is pretty much absent and expecially news about it. This is a big deal, but it doesn’t say much about the actual penetration of unions in a given sector. It’s a complex topic, but I explain it with the fact that the topic is pretty much uninteresting, unless it’s a well-known brand is unionizing. Since most famous tech companies are American, there’s enough mass of news there to actually push media outlets to cover news.
In Italy, where there are very few “well-known” IT companies, the topic is completely absent, to the point where IT union organizers from a city don’t know about big wins by other IT unions organizers from another city. Nonetheless the narrative is not the thing, and there can be big impacts that become visible to the general public only after sociological studies.
So, long-story short, the fact you never heard about SITT doesn’t say much about its effectiveness, just about their ability to communicate.