It seems Big Tech is cracking down on its workers. This shouldn’t be surprising since the Trump re-election is, in no small part, backlash to the employee revolt of 2019-2024.

We should view the events of 2019-2024 as a revolt by employees* against managers** and employers***, as all of these events were challenges to managers and employers (not an all-inclusive list):

1. The Black Lives Matter protests, and how they attempted to alter workplaces.
2. Modest gains by women in terms of sexual harassment and workplace opportunities.
3. High profile union victories (even as union membership as a percentage of all workers dropped).
4. A tighter labor market, giving at least a subset of employees more bargaining power, and thus the ability to tell their employers to ‘take this job and shove it’ (as the song goes).
5. Increased tolerance towards LGBTQ people, especially in the workplace.
6. Increased working from home. This undercut the legitimacy of many upper-level managers and bosses, as the employees and the companies they worked for seemed to do fine, if not better. A subset of managers and bosses hated teleworking. That it also made it easier for women and the disabled to compete with them didn’t go unnoticed either.

So there was a lot of anger and perceived loss of status by managers and employers, and I don’t think we can ignore how critical that loss of status was for the ‘red-pilling’ of a lot of influential people. This is why so many of them, even now, view the ‘left’ as bad as the right: for them, it was.

Next time there’s an employee revolt, we need to finish the job.

*I’m using the word employee instead of worker because the left too often fetishizes the word worker with certain kinds of work, when a key element is if the employee has considerable control over how they do their work, as well as the duration and conditions of their work. There are more than a few reasonably well-paid professions where the employee has very little control over key aspects of their work (e.g., much of the healthcare system).

**As is always the case, where people in the middle of a hierarchy fit in the employee/employer dichotomy is difficult to determine. There are people with the title of managers who are essentially employees and vice versa.

***Mind you, the employer doesn’t have to be a CEO; a (very) small business owner can be as much a workplace tyrant as any CEO. Some people like being masters of their demense, regardless of its size…