From ethical to social struggles

For the past few years, GAFAM employees and the contract workers and freelancers working for Californian tech companies have been developing various forms of virtual or physical protest in their workplaces, ranging from petitions to walkouts, marches and demonstrations, the creation of coalitions and collectives on social networks, and attempts to unionize. These collective actions usually involve a minority of employees but receive significant public attention while eliciting strong reactions from employers. This article, based on an empirical study of 275 actions of unprecedented scale in Silicon Valley, carried out since 2015 at the heart of High Tech capitalism – essentially GAFAM and their subsidiaries and subcontractors –, offers an initial analysis and interpretation of these mobilizations. The unionization movement is resituated in the history of unions and anti-unionism in the United States. The article posits a dual convergence of collective action allowed by digital capitalism, between ethical and social struggles on the one hand, and between white-collar and blue-collar workers on the other. These convergences raise the question of how the social sciences are used to classify and distinguish between different types of social movements and between different forms of critique.