![]() ![]() Ride-hailing and delivery companies like Uber can onboard drivers around the world so long as the drivers have a car and a smartphone. Platforms like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk can directly send work to anyone who has a laptop and an internet connection. In contrast, outsourcing for the tech industry has a much lower barrier. In some cases, legal measures needed to be erected to ensure that safe labor conditions were met. ![]() Infrastructure, such as highways or railroads, was needed for the transportation of goods. Countries in the Global South needed capital investment to construct new factories. In manufacturing, outsourcing was common, but not trivial. ![]() The tech sector is unique only in how it accelerated this trend to outsource, and turned it into a seamless process. Either way, outsourcing work to wherever labor is the cheapest allowed multinational firms to drive down wages and undercut any labor protections that workers in the US enjoyed. In other cases, they simply exploit the lower cost of living of the Global South. In some cases, companies take advantage of the lack of labor protections abroad. This allowed rich multinational firms to exploit large pools of cheap labor. Capital moved freely while labor was kept within borders. The globalization of the manufacturing sector laid the groundwork for outsourcing jobs. Tech is not unique in this ability to ravage the planet for cheap labor. In the struggle against an unaccountable tech elite, tech labor organizers in the US should remember that US tech companies have built their fortunes off the exploitation of workers abroad. This means that the exploitation of drivers in China and South-East Asia (where Grab is the dominant ride-hail service) directly contributes to Uber’s bottomvline. Uber itself owns 28% of Grab and 12% of Didi. Japanese venture capital firm Softbank dominates the entire industry with major stakes in Uber, Didi (China), Ola (India), and Grab (South-East Asia). The ride-hail industry is a good example of how the venture capital-backed ecosystem has its tentacles spread throughout the Global South. The global network of tech capital is much larger than these tech giants themselves. The reality is much less spectacular: outsourced human labor is at the root of tech’s profit. These global networks of outsourcing work belie the myth that American tech companies produce enormous value on innovation alone. Facebook, similarly, offloads whatever they can’t automate to customer service workers and content moderators, most of whom are based in English-speaking countries in the Global South. Large internet firms like Microsoft and Google outsource software development to IT service providers in India, such as Infosys, Cognizant and Wipro. Apple is perhaps the most famous example, known for exploiting cheap Chinese labor from manufacturers like Foxconn to produce electronic goods. Many of them not only have offices abroad, but also rely on swaths of contracted labor in the Global South. Today, American tech companies have transnational empires with complex networks of dependencies. To realise the importance of internationalism in the tech labor movement, we must understand the complex and often invisible ways that (predominantly western) tech is enmeshed in the global economy. This essay draws inspiration from emerging tech worker collective actions around the world and explores how tech workers can develop an internationalist labor movement built around collective strength. However, to truly hold tech companies accountable, workers must not only organize at home, but start to build connections-and eventually organize-with their coworkers abroad. The gradual normalization of unions in the tech industry has captured a new imagination for what is possible when tech workers organize. “Help us be Alphabet’s conscience”, proclaimed the recently-formed Alphabet Workers Union, a minority union composed of full-time employees, temporary employees, vendors, and contractors at Google’s parent company. To hold these tech companies accountable, tech workers in the United States have begun to organize. Yet we continue to be sold the myth that the workers of the tech industry, which spans every corner of the globe, have nothing to do with each other. Tech companies are the new empires of today: Alphabet annual revenue surpassed Hungary’s GDP, Facebook employs over 15000 content moderators around the world, and Microsoft has built datavcenters in nearly every corner of our planet. ![]()
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