Labor and Passion

Posted 2026-05-01

Collective action by workers is not a recent invention, and the history of how it has succeeded, failed, been suppressed, and revived is more useful than speculation about what tech workers might do. Unions didn’t arise because workers read pamphlets about class consciousness. They arose because individual bargaining consistently produced worse outcomes than collective bargaining. Once workers understood that, they were willing to accept short-term costs for long-term gains. The question is why it took so long where it did happen, and why in some industries and countries it has barely happened at all.

The concrete achievements of organized labor are consistently underestimated by people who have never not had them: the eight-hour workday, the two-day weekend, workplace safety standards that are actually enforced, prohibition of child labor, unemployment insurance, and employer contributions to healthcare and retirement. These were not conceded voluntarily by employers: they were won through sustained collective action, frequently met with private and state violence.

The British trade union movement traces through roughly 150 years of conflict with the state. The Combination Acts of 1799 and 1800 made union organizing a criminal conspiracy. Their repeal in 1824 was followed by a period of organizing that prompted restriction again. The Tolpuddle Martyrs were transported to Australia in 1834 for administering illegal oaths in the course of forming an agricultural union. The law shifted gradually through the nineteenth century toward grudging tolerance, and the union movement grew through the early twentieth century into a major institutional force. The General Strike of 1926, called in solidarity with striking coal miners, lasted nine days before the Trades Union Congress called it off without achieving its central demands—a failure that revealed the limits of sympathy action and the state’s willingness to use emergency powers against organized labor. The Thatcher government’s legislation in the 1980s systematically dismantled union power through restrictions on secondary action, changes to balloting requirements, and direct confrontation with the miners’ strike of 1984-85. British unions have never recovered.

The German “Mitbestimmung” system (the word means codetermination) is structurally different than the adversarial model that evolved in the UK and US. Under German law, workers in firms with more than 2,000 employees hold half the seats on the supervisory board that hires and oversees management. This is not advisory participation; it is formal institutional authority over corporate governance. The system emerged from specific post-war conditions: Allied occupation policy that sought to break the power of the industrial combines that had supported National Socialism, the political strength of the Social Democratic party, and an industrial union structure that organized by sector rather than trade and could negotiate industry-wide agreements. None of those conditions existed in the same combination elsewhere, which explains why codetermination spread within Germany but was not replicated in comparable form in other wealthy democracies.

Australia’s Conciliation and Arbitration Act of 1904 built a labor system unlike either the British adversarial model or German codetermination. A federal industrial court—not collective bargaining—set wages and conditions through legally binding “awards” that applied across whole industries. The 1907 Harvester judgment established the “basic wage” as the minimum needed to support a family in frugal comfort, making the court rather than the union the primary institution for raising living standards. Union membership was high because belonging to a union was a condition of accessing the award system in many industries, not because workers had achieved industrial leverage through organizing. The entire structure was dismantled during the 1990s under market liberalization, replaced by enterprise bargaining that produces outcomes the arbitration system was specifically designed to avoid: wide variation in wages and conditions within the same industry, and workers negotiating individually against employers who negotiate collectively.

South Africa’s Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), founded in 1985, illustrates how labor organizing and political mobilization can reinforce each other in conditions where both operate against state repression. The apartheid state imposed restrictions on Black union activity that made conventional organizing dangerous. COSATU built power through industrial action, consumer boycotts, and explicit political alignment with the African National Congress and the South African Communist Party. Strikes that shut down production in the mining and transport sectors imposed economic costs that the apartheid government could not absorb indefinitely. The combination of internal pressure from COSATU and community organizations, and external pressure from the international sanctions and divestment campaign, eventually forced the apartheid government to the negotiating table. Labor organizing did not produce South African democracy alone, but it was a necessary component of the coalition that did.

Workers are frequently persuaded not to organize in their own economic interest, and the mechanisms deserve careful examination. High individual compensation is the most direct approach: workers who are paid well relative to their labor market alternatives have less to gain from collective bargaining, and more to lose from conflict with employers who pay them well. Union avoidance is a formal management discipline with a consulting industry behind it: labor relations firms advise employers on how to structure workplaces and compensation to prevent the conditions under which organizing becomes attractive.

But structural barriers and employer tactics do not fully explain tech workers’ resistance to organizing. The sociologist Erin Cech calls the deeper mechanism the “passion principle”: the expectation that workers should pursue work they find personally fulfilling, and that fulfillment is a legitimate criterion for choosing and evaluating a job. What began as an aspiration of the professional class has, over the past several decades, been generalized into something closer to a moral obligation. The question of who captures the surplus when workers internalize this norm has a clear answer: employers. A worker who derives intrinsic meaning from a job will accept lower wages, longer hours, and worse conditions than a worker who treats employment as a transaction.

The passion principle does not eliminate the imbalance of power; it serves to conceal it. Mission-driven culture, equity compensation that vests over four years, elaborate campus amenities, and the language of changing the world are all intended to align workers’ identities with their employers’ interests. In exchange, tech workers accept the effective absence of collective bargaining rights, employment-at-will conditions that make them instantly terminable, and mandatory arbitration clauses that eliminate their access to courts. The exchange is not hidden: instead, tech companies brag about it. Organizing feels like betrayal—not because the employer has convinced workers that unions are bad, but because workers have been convinced that they are not really workers at all.

The Japanese postwar salaryman—the white-collar male employee of a major corporation—is the fullest institutional form of this identity fusion. Enterprise unions organized workers at a single company rather than across an industry, which aligned union interests with their employer’s competitive position rather than with the interests of workers doing the same job elsewhere. Lifetime employment guarantees and seniority-based wages made departure from a major employer genuinely costly in ways that went beyond lost salary. Karoshi—death from overwork—was officially recognized as a workplace harm by Japanese courts from the 1970s onward, naming a phenomenon that emerged directly from the expectation of total commitment to the firm. The arrangement was a bargain: workers surrendered occupational mobility and class solidarity, and in exchange employers provided security, status, and predictable advancement. When Japan’s asset bubble collapsed in 1990, corporations began breaking this compact through restructuring and the expansion of precarious “non-regular” employment, leaving a generation of workers without the security the old model promised and without the collective bargaining structures a differently organized labor movement might have preserved.

Cech’s research shows that the passion principle falls hardest on workers from less privileged socioeconomic backgrounds, who have the most to lose from accepting its terms. Workers from more privileged backgrounds are better positioned to absorb the costs of passion-coded careers: family wealth provides a cushion, networks provide alternative paths, and prior social capital makes it easier to exit without losing everything. For workers without those resources, the passion principle is not a path to fulfillment. It is a mechanism that extracts years of discounted labor before returning them to the general labor market with depleted savings and credentials that do not transfer.

Precarious workers like gig workers and seasonal workers are hit hardest by this. Organizing takes time that precarious workers may not have. It also requires a willingness to accept risk of termination, which workers without income security cannot absorb as readily. Many precarious workers are formally classified as independent contractors, which in most jurisdictions removes them from the legal framework that protects organizing activity for employees. The legal boundary between employee and contractor has been contested in dozens of jurisdictions and in relation to dozens of firms, with outcomes that vary by jurisdiction and have been inconsistent even within jurisdictions. Over and over, rules are rewritten or re-interpreted to ensure that the workers most exposed to poor conditions and wage theft, who have the most to gain from collective bargaining, are least able to fight back.

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Cech2021: Erin Cech: The Trouble with Passion: How Searching for Fulfillment at Work Fosters Inequality. University of California Press, 2021, 978-0520303232.
Gordon2001: Andrew Gordon: The Wages of Affluence: Labor and Management in Postwar Japan. Harvard University Press, 2001, 978-0674007062.
Jaffe2021: Sarah Jaffe: Work Won’t Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone. Bold Type Books, 2021, 978-1568589398.
Kelly2022: Kim Kelly: Fight Like Hell: The Untold History of American Labor. One Signal, 2022, 978-1982171063.
Macintyre2020: Stuart Macintyre: A Concise History of Australia (5th ed.). Cambridge University Press, 2020, 978-1108728485.
Silver2003: Beverly J. Silver: Forces of Labor: Workers’ Movements and Globalization Since 1870. Cambridge University Press, 2003, 978-0521520775.
Thelen1992: Kathleen Thelen: Union of Parts: Labor Politics in Postwar Germany. Cornell University Press, 1991, 978-0801425868.