Sehee Lee

The high-tech industry had long been considered distant from workplace organizing. Labor unions organized by white-collar tech workers were almost non-existent even after the dot-com crash. However, with the rise of job insecurity in the global tech sector since the COVID-19 Pandemic, the number of collective labor actions has increased substantially. The recently emerging attempts at unionization include both white and blue-collar workers. Although still relatively rare, they signal the transformative dynamics of the tech industry at this unprecedented moment. These dynamics hinge on the tensions between the tech workers’ desire for stability and the tech industry’s pursuit of flexibility and mobility for technological innovation. My research investigates how these tensions of precarity are constituted, manifested, and managed in the global high-tech industry. What makes the high-tech industry distinctively prone to unpredictability and uncertainty? How do tech workers navigate the existential, technological, and economic uncertainty? What better or alternative futures do they envision? I explore these questions through 18 months of fieldwork in Silicon Valley, U.S., and Pangyo Techno Valley, South Korea, and digital ethnographic research on digital platforms tech workers use to navigate their insecurity.