Within and Against: Class-Making of Migrant Tech Workers in Berlin

Long considered an affirmative elite, tech workers have recently been increasingly involved in labor conflicts and social struggles across the world. My project explores the problems, class identities and collective action strategies of migrant tech workers in Berlin, Germany.

On the basis of 50 qualitative interviews and a 14-month ethnography of a local worker collective, my study looks at how tech workers have developed political self-understandings in recent years and how they negotiate their class position in labor conflicts. Based on the research, I argue that a shift towards social conflict can be observed in both the self-understandings and actions of white-collar tech workers. In Berlin, this shift towards class-consciousness is intertwined with struggles on migration (from Global South and Global North) and citizenship. At times, this combination has opened avenues for coalitions with other groups, such as delivery gig workers or housing right initiatives. The difficulties of trade unions in Germany to address tech workers have led to grassroots self-organizing, but also to new experimental methods and revitalization discussions on the side of trade unions.

Although my findings indicate a rise of collective action in recent years, they do not indicate whether tech workers constitute a progressive group as such. Rather, my findings suggests that the tech industry as such has become increasingly contentious and politicized in the last decade, a fact that is also (but not only) reflected in collective action phenomena among tech workers.