A rising tide lifts all boats, is the way I see it. Often places that unionize are where the conditions are the shittiest. My impression is that workers are generally faring better in Canada than they are in the US, but workplaces unionising can have ripple effects even on the international level.

My favourite example of this is something I learned from the Data Workers Iniative which supports research from countries like Kenya, Venezuela, Syria and more. Whilst there’s some harrowing stuff documented by workers in this project, there’s also plenty of good news about workers organising.

For instance, data workers in Kenya contracted to the company Sama were being horrifically exploited in their data labelling work for tech giants like Meta. This led to the formation of the African Content Moderator’s Union, which had impact far beyond Kenya. For instance, when Sama began to open more offices in other African countries, there was much more active worker resistance straight away because of this precedent.

It’s very much a case of “none of us are free until all of us are free”, and I think that in many cases, our own battles are going to rely on workers organising many many miles away from us. In the meantime, we just have to do what we can to help both the local fight, and the wider fight.