System Error: Labour Precarity and Collective Organizing at Microsoft1

This article challenges the notion-proposed by liberal-democratic theories of the "knowledge worker" and industry accounts of "friction-free" capitalism-that labour conflict is no longer relevant within digital capitalism via an in-depth examination of a case of collective organizing by temporary workers at Microsoft. The paper suggests the formation and activities of their union, WashTech, prefigures 21st century collective organizing. Two concepts are proposed as guides to these struggles. "Immaterial labour" refers to a set of increasingly important forms of labour within post-Fordism, ranging from call-centre work to software development. "Precarity" denotes the material and existential insecurity suffered by workers as a result of flexible employment arrangements. These concepts are examined by drawing on archival material and interviews with WashTech members. Across Europe, May Day marches attracting tens of thousands of people are being organized each year around what has become a dominant theme of labour activism on that continent: "precarious" work. Organizers of the 2004 march in Milan declared themselves to be part of an emergent "cognitariat"-or "precogs," as they called themselves-working in the information and communication industries. The metaphor harboured a warning for their employers-although the mutant "pre-cog" characters in the science-fiction movie Minority Report are unscrupulously exploited for what their brains can produce in the present, they also possess the unnerving ability to see the future. This future, according to declarations circulated by the May Day organizers, is one in which the goal of "flexicurity" is counterposed to their current condition of "flexploitation" (Middlesex declaration of Europe s precariat 2004, 2004). The study of these forms of high-tech work as iterations of immaterial labour, however, is important for other reasons. Not only is it a paradigmatic form of work in the knowledge economy, but the kinds of labour arrangements within it are, fittingly, increasingly precarious. As a recent "occupational outlook" handbook produced by the U.S. Department of Labor suggested, many "computer programmers" and an increasing number of "computer software engineers" and "computer systems analysts" are employed on a "temporary or contract basis" (United States Department of Labor, 2006b, 2006c, 2006d). In a country where by some estimates "temporary" jobs make up a quarter of the nation's work positions (Swoboda, 200