Once upon a time, young graduates thought they had a choice to make: they could become rich but miserable in an investment bank or law firm, or they could live without a huge salary but do something more fun. Then the big technology companies came along. Suddenly, it was possible for someone with a certain set of skills to have fun and get rich at the same time. The tech firms seemed to represent a less hierarchical world of work where everyone wore jeans and T-shirts and merit was what mattered most. The salaries were high and the stock options plentiful. If you were lucky, your employer would also take care of the boring parts of life, doing your laundry for you, cooking you meals and taking you home at night. This year, tech companies accounted for five of the top 10 places to work in the US based on employee reviews on Glassdoor.
Policymakers and economists soon came to see tech workers as the archetypal winners of the 21st century economy: firmly at the “lovely” end of the growing gap between “lovely” and “lousy” jobs.
When some employees in the sector tried to unionise, the response from companies and investors was often to argue these were already dream jobs, so what was the point? As one investor put it, tech workers trying to unionise were “appropriating the language of exploited coal miners while enjoying the most privileged, white collar work experience in human history”.