You don't need a union to go on strike

I read through Ethical AI Departures and would like to note that only a few of them have gotten extensive media coverage and none of them have actually effectively gotten the frontier labs to stop, and that collectively signed letters by employees have historically not done much either.

I read Dear God, Please Do Not Resign In Protest and wanted to point out that leftists have a mature and relatively reliable set of strategies to address the problem of how to get a lot of people to stop working in protest at the same time.

Then I did a search of LW to see if someone else brought unions up already, read What if AI safety labs unionized?, and flinched at the repeated citation of reasons why a union isn't the correct legal structure and the absurdly complicated legal structure that was being suggested instead. So no, what you want right now isn't an official, bureaucratic union. In fact, that would probably slow things down too much.

But I've done enough work with union people to know that you don't need to go through the traditional channels. You don't need to have a majority vote supervised by the NLRB; pre-majority unionism is a legitimate strategy. You don't need to be striking for a contract; you can just be striking for an individual concession. A strike does not have to be leaving the workplace and making a picket line; work slowdowns or still doing work and just giving it away for free can be effective too (the latter is technically illegal but can be scarily effective). You don't need to have an official union structure backing you; wildcat strikes happen all the time. You don't even have to want to start a union at all.

All you really need for a strike is something unacceptable happening, and people walking out together because of it. Everything else is fluff.

If you're reading this and need help going from "disgruntled" to "collective action", the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee gives one-on-one mentorship on how to start doing union-adjacent work, up to and including providing and roleplaying social scripts (you'd be surprised how necessary that often ends up being). At the moment, they respond within 24 hours to most inquiries. Usually they focus on building up union power privately in the back first, but if you make it clear this is a flashpoint and you need to seize the moment, they'll work with that too.

(I'm mostly hoping this somehow gets sent to a privately disgruntled frontier lab employee, but it would also be cool to expand other people's minds on the way there.)