REIN: This is Rein Henrichs and welcome to Episode 182 of Greater Than Code. I am here with my friend and co-host, John Sawers.

JOHN: Thanks, Rein. And I'm here with our guest, Ellen Wondra. Ellen is a coder, cat herder and very crafty. She likes writing on software at the intersection of software and art and quite a lot of other interesting things that we're going to talk about today. Welcome to the show, Ellen.

ELLEN: Thanks so much for having me here.

JOHN: Well, we'll start with the first question, the one we always start with. What is your superpower and how did you acquire it?

ELLEN: My superpower is that I always know what my cats and dogs are thinking. And I acquired that one from just spending way too much time with them. Even before the self isolation, I just had way too much time alone with my pets. I always know before they start doing the like, "Hey, we got to go outside," that my dogs need to go for a walk. I always know before my cat shows up and is like, "All right, I'm going to jump on your lap and start eating that microphone," that that's what she's about to do.

JOHN: Cool. Do you find that that translates into humans at various times, or is it simply cat-specific?

ELLEN: I think it does translate to humans, actually. I just know more cats and dogs than humans. So I practice that power more often with animals because I'm so cool and have so many friends. It's all about observation. Actually, I think it translates more to children, too, because observing animals has made me realize that they give off a lot of subtle signals. And then you also see that kids are also constantly giving off subtle signals. And then some adults who are only used to communicating through language, look at a child who is clearly like, "Hey, I'm hungry," or, "Hey, I'm thirsty," or whatever. And they're like, "Well, you aren't saying that in words. So you are nothing." That's an obscure box of nothingness. I have no idea what you're trying to communicate. And I'm like, "It's holding a water glass. It wants water in it. Give the child water." Just because it can't say the words 'I want water', it doesn't mean it's not communicating 'give me water'.

JOHN: So paying attention, really?

ELLEN: Yes. My superpower is paying attention to nonverbal cues.

JOHN: That's actually pretty powerful.

REIN: Good one.

ELLEN: Yeah, it works out sometimes.

REIN: I definitely do think that that is a superpower because most communication is nonverbal. And Virginia Satir -- there it is in the first minute, check that on your bingo sheet.

ELLEN: [Laughs]

REIN: Talks about congruence as manifesting as alignment between what you say and how you say it. And being able to see when someone isn't being congruent, I really think is a superpower, especially for people who try to facilitate difficult conversations and things like that.

JOHN: I feel like that ability to detect incongruence is super handy. As you were saying, Rein, if you're in an important conversation, whether it's emotionally intense or practically intense or whatever, being able to tell when someone is not incongruence is really useful. So that you can either help them realize that they're not fully synchronized or so that you can realize that they're not really synchronized because they're intentionally misleading you or trying to present something that isn't the way it is.

ELLEN: Yeah, very much so. And I think my powers personally tend more towards the former, towards recognizing that someone does have that incongruity within themselves, within what they're saying and what they're feeling and noticing subtle cues in their language or what they're communicating with words and what they're communicating with feelings, and being able to point that out.

REIN: Have you all seen that show Lie to Me?

JOHN: Yes.

ELLEN: Yeah.

REIN: It's a good show. Tim Roth is incredible. I think of it as not so much being a lie detector. It's being able to see when the word someone is saying isn't what they're really wanting to communicate. 

ELLEN: What are the kinds of lies? I'm aware that it exists, but I don't know much about it. What kinds of lies are they talking about?

REIN: The show is based on the research into micro expressions that Malcolm Gladwell talks about in, what was it? Link, I think.

JOHN: Yeah.

REIN: And so, the show is basically an author avatar of the dude who did the original research, who now fights crime, like an author stand-in for that dude played by Tim Roth, who detects lies and fights crime.

ELLEN: Nice.

REIN: And the way that he detects lies is by noticing micro expressions that indicate that the thing they're saying isn't really the thing they mean. So, like shaking your head no when you say yes is one of the cliché ones. But it's also a real thing. I think of it less as like spotting outliers. I got how you're lying and more spotting when people are having trouble being fully themselves.

ELLEN: So it's very interesting. I want to say, too, though, that I believe -- I would need to like look it up to double check. But I want to say that there's certain particular levels of neurodivergence that micro expressions are like the opposite of what the micro expression law says. So in particular, things like looking in the wrong direction when you're remembering something vs. making something up. Things like that. So, expression on things that they see in neurotypical people and say like, "Hey, that indicates duplicity," are actually just standard forms of expression within people who are autistic or people who -- I don't actually remember what the -- people who are on certain -- I don't remember the words. [Laughs] My brain was so focused on Germany this morning. I was not thinking about the micro expressions. But it's interesting. That sounds like a good show. I was thinking about that when micro expressions come up.

REIN: I will say in defense of the show that one thing they always do is have a little bit where he establishes a baseline by getting them to tell him a lie so that he can see what they look like when they're lying or something like that. So, it is true, I think, that these things don't manifest the same way in everyone.

ELLEN: Sure. And also, I mean, we're not going to fictional drama shows going like, "Oh yeah, this is going to be exactly like a representation of how it should be in real life."

REIN: He's basically a crime fighting superhero. It's a superhero show.

ELLEN: Excellent.

JOHN: I think that whole, like which direction you look when you're recalling versus like confabulating is I think that was pretty well debunked. And I know that the science behind the micro expression stuff is, as of the last information I had, wasn't like 100%, like, "Yes, we have this locked in," kind of a thing. And I think that point about neurodivergence is a really good one, because if all the research did was on grand students at Stanford, then that's a very narrow slice of the population and their behaviors.

ELLEN: It's also very often for researchers to only do research on people who are assigned male at birth, in particular for a reason. I mean, I guess that's more often for research on things with medical issues, but it's often considered that being assigned female at birth is too complex for medical studies. You'll read papers on birth control and they'll do studies on birth control that they will do on people who were assigned male at birth for birth control for people who are assigned female at birth. It's wild.

REIN: I will say that I don't think of myself as a micro expression detector. Many times incongruence takes on very macro forms. 

ELLEN: Yeah. My personal incongruence detector tends to be things like when people talk about how they limit themselves. I mean, people in their conversation, when they talk about themselves, they'll talk about their goals. And a lot of the times, instead of talking about the things they want, they'll talk about the way that their past has made them feel that they are limited.

REIN: Virginia Satir would very much agree with you.

ELLEN: Yes. I'm not familiar with that person, so I would love to hear more, if you want to talk more about that.

REIN: Oh, I sure do.

ELLEN: Okay. 

REIN: It's kind of a running gag on the podcast that I bring her up all the time, but she's very often relevant. She was a family therapist who started in the 50's and practiced until like the late 80's. She is largely responsible for creating a form of family therapy called Conjoint Family Therapy, which is where they brought the whole family into the room, into the therapeutic setting rather than isolating the problem child in one-on-one interviews. 

ELLEN: Okay.

REIN: She was sort of a systems thinker. And so, she wanted to look at the family holistically.

ELLEN: Interesting. Yeah, I think that is both very interesting and a good sort of steering back. I like it.

REIN: So she said her sort of vision was, if you can heal the family, you can heal the world.

ELLEN: That is very interesting.

REIN: I'm not a therapist. I'm not qualified as a therapist. I don't claim to be. But I do find a lot of her method helpful to me when I'm facilitating things, because it's really about human relationships. And family relationships are just a particular type of relationship that humans can have. But there is, I think, more in common between different human relationships than there is different.

ELLEN: Yeah. I would absolutely agree there. And having the basis of -- I'm also very much not a therapist, but I've had a lot of various bits of therapy over the years and having that kind of basis of just taking people's concerns seriously and thinking about people seriously and relationships and thinking about humans as people and not resources is a weirdly big step but it's very important. 

REIN: You know how startups and other companies sometimes talk about how they're a family and how gross that is.

ELLEN: Yeah.

REIN: It's pretty gross. But it is true. The people who are on, for example, software teams develop real meaningful human relationships with each other. They're not going to be like siblings, but they are real people that are interacting in real ways. It's impossible to not.

ELLEN: The US is like what we call a shareholder focused economy. What that means, we have a shareholder value perspective. So we think of the objective of a company is to bring value to shareholders. Does that kind of makes sense? Would you generally agree with me there that that seems like our value system?

REIN: Yeah.

JOHN: Yeah.

ELLEN: And this is also backed by research. I've got the paper and all the sources. 

REIN: I mean, I would call it exploiting the surplus value of labor, but shareholder value also works.

ELLEN: Excellent. But it turns out that that is not the way it is everywhere. So, Germany is a stakeholder value perspective country. And I happen to study German, the language, the country, the politics, literature, all that stuff for seven years. I'm not myself German. I am not an expert in the same way that someone who lives there, who worked in German firms and all that would be, to be clear. But stakeholder value perspective countries, that perspective, it's an organizational purpose that [inaudible] in Germany and other countries. And so it's called sometimes the welfare state is combined with a so-called consultation economy. So what they do is instead of saying that the purpose of a firm is to bring value to the shareholders, they say the purpose of the firm is to bring value to all of the stakeholders, which includes shareholders, employees, suppliers, consumers, the government, and the community where the firm is active. So that means like the corner store where employees go buy to get their soda on their way to work. All of that. The whole community. And then the firms try to balance the interests of all of the stakeholders and they frequently consult with them.

Firms and stakeholder economies have reputations for longer term contracts because when you're in a stakeholder economy, it's not a family in the same way. It's not a family in the exploitative kind of thing. But because you have this kind of enmeshment, it's not like here where you're just trying to make a quick buck or where you're trying to get as much money as you can, where it's an exploitative thing. But you have a longer term contracts because you have this fundamental belief that a firm and a supplier can find an arrangement that's long lasting and mutually beneficial. So, it's this whole fundamentally different belief system, and it changes everything.

REIN: I like it. One of the things that reminds me of is the difference in game theory between a single staged game and a repeated game. So, a game is played multiple times. And there are scenarios that are sort of prisoners' dilemmas in single staged games where you end up screwing each other over which if you know you have to play the game again, you will make different decisions.

ELLEN: Yes, that is very much the case. That absolutely happens. They tend to be like short term contracts with suppliers, poor supplier relations, supply disruptions and quality issues also are hallmarks in shareholder systems. Hey, who's been dealing with supply disruptions, quality issues, and poor supplier relations in this time of crisis lately? What shareholder economies have been having trouble?

REIN: So yeah, interestingly, in a book called Out of the Crisis, Deming talked a lot about the importance of maintaining long term relationships with vendors and suppliers.

ELLEN: Yeah, it is very important and it's a lot harder to do in a shareholder value system than it is in stakeholder value system. So because of this, there's this idea called Mitbestimmungsgesetz, which is literally codetermination. So there's a worker council and a council of executives that work together on problems as they crop up. And so having that in addition to these good supplier relations, is one of the reasons that historians believe and economists believe that Germany pulled itself out of the last economic crisis so quickly is that they had this group of executives and workers who were actually working to solve the problem so quickly. And then they had the set relationship.

REIN: The really interesting thing about this for me is that, so there are different forms of codetermination and they map onto Marx's forms of alienation.

ELLEN: Tell me more about that.

REIN: There's codetermination in your work position, being informed, consulted about your tasks and responsibilities and procedures and so on. And this maps on to alienation of the work, the sort of [inaudible] you're told what to do. You don't get to make decisions about how you carry out your tasks and so on. Then there is operational codetermination, which is about business arrangements, how personnel are allocated, how you hire and things like that. And then there is corporate determination, which is sort of like how the company is structured, who is on what is sort of equivalent to the board of directors? And it's interesting to me because the theory of alienation is that capitalism is designed to separate workers from the things that they derive meaning from in the work. And it seems like codetermination is, in some senses, an attempt to bring that connection back. So, I just find that interesting.

JOHN: It occurred to me that that it's so much more of a focus on relationships than on states. I'm thinking of focus on the connection between two dots rather than the dots themselves.

REIN: Yeah, that's a really common thing you'll find in complexity theory that the interactions between the parts are much more interesting than the parts themselves. It's true of complex adaptive systems, which is sort of the domain of study. And it turns out that corporations and states and things are those. They are complex and adaptive.

ELLEN: Yeah. One hundred percent that it is absolutely in these stakeholders' systems about the focus on the relationships, the connections between the dots. They focus a lot on the anxiety of the social uncertainty that this fear that you'll start a contract and that someone will then break the contract to go and have a contract with someone else because it's better or that those social connections will break down versus the exchange value uncertainty that you see in shareholder societies where they're worried that you'll start a contract and the value of the contract that you have will decrease, because you're always looking for maximizing the value of the contracts that you already have, then seeing if you can exchange that contract for something else.

So talking about business personnel allocation anxieties, what if we talk about termination of employment contracts in Germany, because this blew my mind. My professor talked with me about it for an entire class period. We talked about nothing but getting fired because it was so alien to me. If you want to terminate your employment contract in Germany, if there's a works council that exists there, which is not the same thing as -- a works council, as I said, because one of the things that can work with the executive council to solve problems that exists on the ground in your firm. So if it exists, they need to be notified and consulted before every dismissal, every single one. Basic dismissal period is four weeks and it can be greater if you've worked there for longer. So in any business with more than 10 employees, termination of employees that have been employed for more than six months has to be socially justified. And so, you have to prove that it was based on person related reasons, conduct related reasons, or operational. So for conduct, if you're saying, "Your conduct was not acceptable and that's why I'm going to fire you," you need to have a prior written warning and prove that you said the conduct was unacceptable and that they were given a chance to improve it and they can take you to court if you did not do that.

If it's on personal grounds, which is usually something like an absence due to illness, like if you said, "Hey, I can work a lot," and then suddenly you're not able to work. Or you can have a dismissal for operational reasons, like saying that this position no longer exists. But this is the one that's really interesting to me, because if it's something that's changed on a structural entrepreneurial decision on the employer's part, like if it's in the interest of profitability, that job that doesn't exist anymore, that position is gone, you have to prove that it permanently ceases to exist. And there's no vacant positions in the company, so you can't move that person anywhere else. And then the employer can't actually choose which person they remove. They have to conduct a social selection among comparable employees. So what they do is they look at all of the employees in that kind of position, and they compare their age, their years of service. They look to see if they're married. They see if they have dependent children. If they have a severe disability, they check to see if it's going to be easy for them to get another job or not. And based on that, that's how they, in cooperation with this works council, decide who gets removed from that position, who gets fired.

So they work together to decide who they think is going to be most employable. They basically get rid of their best employee in that position who has like the fewest dependent children or like who's in the least vulnerable position. And that's who they get rid of, because the burden of proof is on the employer to prove that they have to get rid of someone and because the goal is to absolutely make sure that you do not fire people. The goal is to say like, "Hey, these are humans with jobs. We want to keep them employed. We're not ruining their lives. We're not getting rid of them for no reason." And people who are protected from getting fired includes pregnant employees, mothers after childbirth, employees on parental leave, and then candidates and members of the worker council and the data protection office. So every time that I see things about people getting fired for trying to organize, things like that, I think about these policies, about how unbelievably hard it is to get fired in Germany.

JOHN: It's a very different system.

ELLEN: It blows my mind. 

REIN: When you hear about these rules and policies and you look at sort of their closest equivalents in the US, for example, I guess performance improvement plans is something like the paper trail that you're talking about. The cynical and not completely inaccurate view of PIPs is that you've decided to fire someone and now you need a paper trail so that you can show that it was justified, right? 

ELLEN: Right.

REIN: That's sort of a malicious compliance type of deal. I'm wondering how much of that there is in these German companies. You have to follow the letter of the law, but you certainly plan on firing this person you don't like.

ELLEN: I'm sure that there's some of that. I first got this from my coauthor, by which I mean the main author, I coauthored, who is a German woman from Germany, who was explaining the system to me for an hour because I did not believe her that I worked like that. So I'm sure that there are absolutely many places that are bad and that do have that kind of system. But there are also a lot that do have those protections. Germany has legendary labor protection.

REIN: It seems like the counterbalance, the sort of countervailing force of the worker councils is giving workers equal representation in business decisions. And I think for me, the take away is that power matters. These things work in certain power dynamic and don't work in a different power dynamic.

JOHN: You mean because the workers in the German context have that influence on the council?

REIN: I think I could be wrong. It seems possible to me. If you look at what happened in US companies and when a worker is put on a performance improvement plan, if they're not a member of a union, they have effectively no recourse. They're completely at the whims and the mercy of their employer. They have no countervailing power to what their boss decides.

ELLEN: My takeaway is that the structure matters and that we need to say that I want to have those kind of structures and build those kinds of structures because I'm optimistic and cynical. And you're right, in the US, we don't have those kinds of protections. But also, there are countries that have them and make them work. And in the US, we have a lot of it's, I think, very much a company line to say that there aren't protections, that there won't be safety.

We saw there was -- what was it, the article that Carina put in the Slack today about the Amazon workers who use their power to strike and get the Amazon worker reinstated in Shakopee, Minnesota. So, the structure doesn't exist, but the power actually does. It's just that without the underlying structure in place -- actually, back to my paper again.

Hey, it's the Ellen hour. So it comes a little bit down to emergent and deliberate strategy. And so deliberate strategy is like the strategy that when you're sitting down and deliberating and you can stop and think and plan it out and make decisions, that's the strategy that you want to have. That's the like, "Okay, cool. I'm going to have breakfast this morning and work real hard and do good stuff." Emergent strategy is a strategy that you fall back on when you're in times of crisis and something's happening. That means you cannot do that. Breakfast isn't there. You can't go outside, whatever's going on. So you fall back on whatever you have, the structures and the culture to do.

So what we see now is that companies like Germany have the structure and have the culture of a stakeholder value perspective. They have the sort of stakeholder thing going on where they value more than just the shareholder. And so that's what they fall back on in times of crisis. In the US, we have this shareholder thing going on. And so in times of crisis, we don't have those same kind of protections. We don't have that strong labor protection. I think, though, too, that what we're seeing now is that I kind of think that the gig economy that we have created has built some people who do actually have a stakeholder like economy. And they're now coming together right now and using their power, even though they don't have this structure to fall back on to protect each other. That's what we're seeing some with these protests. But even though we don't have the structure to fall back on to help save us and to guide us in times when we're stuck on this emergent strategy and when we're scared and not sure what to do, that power still exists. We just don't know how to use it.

JOHN: Yeah, I think because we've lost so much of that familiarity, that common everyday language, talking about worker rights and unions and labor over the last 50 years. So much of that has disappeared that it's not something people think about these days, except the people that are now being targeted by Amazon.

REIN: One commonality in these various things we're talking about is that workers have more power than perhaps we think we do, but it comes from our ability to work together. It comes from a collective action. So the Amazon worker was reinstated because of the collective action of their coworkers.

JOHN: Yeah. I think that was partly what I was trying to get to is I feel like we've lost some of the understanding of the capabilities of collective action.

REIN: I would argue that that is by design.

JOHN: Oh, sure. [Chuckles]

REIN: So one of the forms of alienation is alienation of the worker from each other. And so, becoming more apart and less connected is a feature of capitalism because it reduces the ability of workers to form alternative power structures by working together.

ELLEN: I'm going to mispronounce it, so I'm real sorry. But at [inaudible], I think is the name, and the worker who was fired and then reinstated? Hey, Minnesota.

REIN: Yeah. Even a small group of workers working together is terrifying to bosses.

ELLEN: It is. I would argue it's them trying to make tech workers view ourselves as part of the company, as part of the tech and not part of the workers, not align ourselves with our coworkers who are risking their lives out there delivering packages or getting food or whatever. They're trying to keep us on the shareholders' side. We have to think about when we talk about people, and especially right now, given how hard things are right now, who are people? Who are they? Who are we? Who are we talking about? I think it's tough.

REIN: Yeah. When you think about why tech workers aren't organizing more, I think part of it does come down to we often don't think of ourselves as workers. A lot of us have salaries that put us in the upper middle class. And like you're saying, we have nominal equity in the companies we work for and these other things are designed to make us believe we have more in common with the bosses than we do with the janitorial staff, for example. But it is still true that we survive by selling our labor to people who profit from our labor. So, we're still workers.

ELLEN: Yeah. And frequently the things that the workers need to make them safer to help them wouldn't hurt us or wouldn't hurt our bosses very much, or the things that we could do to help. I mean, a lot of us have -- I keep wanting to say infinite. It's not infinite time off. It's unlimited time off or whatever they call it. That thing that they say is a perk, but it's actually been proven to make people take less and less and less vacation. This is the time to actually use these perks against them and help people who are hurting. But again, these forces that are at work against all of us, against everyone who's working in tech right now, but we could be building a better tech, like we are tech. That's the thing that's so exciting to me and that I want all of us to grab hold of and run forward with. We are tech. And there are better ways to do this. We can make it better.

JOHN: I know for the longest time, I myself thought that as a tech worker, unions weren't really applicable to me. And as I've paid more attention to it over the last five or six years and started realizing how useful unions are, I was realizing that there's been this super low key propaganda about what unions are and what they're for, just embedded in the parts of American culture that I've encountered that talk about how it's only for interchangeable workers. And it's just really so that you can get a better contract. But because I'm a developer, all my stuff is individually negotiated. So I don't need someone arguing for more pay for me or whatever because I get all those perks anyway. But none of those things are actually relevant to the usefulness of a union. I feel like there's still a challenge to counteract, like legacy of messaging about who unions are for and what we could get out of them.

ELLEN: That is all exactly perfectly right. I just agree with everything you said.

REIN: We are a lot of tech workers positioned in a way that makes it hard for us to see the need to organize and unionize for ourselves. We're paid well. We have good benefits and so on. But there's a lot that organizing can do for each other and for society, like larger society. So are either of you familiar with Project Maven?

JOHN: Nope.

ELLEN: A little bit, but I'd love to hear you talk more about it.

REIN: Project Maven was a Google contract in 2017 with the US military --

JOHN: Oh, yeah.

REIN: To develop artificial intel, like computer vision software to make drone strikes more effective. After months of backlash, they canceled the project. And then Sundar Pichai, Google's CEO was talking about how Google should not be in the business of war and so on. But it turns out that Google didn't do this because of their superior ethics. They did it because workers stood up to them and demanded a change. And the workers that did this, did it through collective pressure.

ELLEN: That's amazing.

JOHN: Yeah, I've often imagined how amazing it would be to have -- I think many times on the show, we've talked about how HR is not your friend. The HR is for the company. And so if you're going to report a problem like harassment, they're there to protect the company. And so, it's not necessarily in your interest to go through them directly to get something addressed. But imagine if we had a union that could represent us, that we could make all of our reports to, that could aggregate statistics across the industry and get real numbers about harassment going on at companies and also be an advocate for the worker in those situations, that would be absolutely amazing.

ELLEN: That would be phenomenal.

REIN: I think the way way we organize effectively is by figuring out what are the levers that we have access to. And a lot of it is our ability to affect the company's bottom line. Honestly, in the economy you're describing in America, that's what matters to the people that run these companies. There was a study that showed that on average, Apple senior software engineer, generates $2 million a year in revenue for Apple while being paid like between $100,000 and $200,000. So, if a thousand Apple employees went on strike for a day, Apple would lose $5 million.

ELLEN: I imagine, too, that it's got to be more right now also because that [inaudible] had to be done when people were able to do things like go outside. I feel like our collective power right now has to be greater than it ever was before. Because not only are people also inside and consuming more online things than ever before, but also people's access to things outside is also dependent on apps. Our collective power is greater than ever before.

REIN: At the same time, though, like at a macro level, labor power is at an all-time low. Unions today are less powerful than they've ever been. I don't have a happy thought.

JOHN: I know. [Chuckles] I was like, "So, what do we do about it?"

ELLEN: I think that we add our power to it. Part of that is that we have been so divorced from, as we've been saying, we've been so divorced from the other workers. We've been so divorced from the other workers. We've had all these social pressures to make us think of ourselves as closer to the bosses than to the people who are working to deliver the things, who are working to actually consume that, to make deliveries, to work in the warehouses, whatever. And we should be building our unions to be working with and for them because they are our coworkers. They are. We need to be thinking about them as such. Not like people who work somewhere else and have different problems. I guess I maybe don't know enough about unions specifically to talk about that particular force, but we have so much power if we can work together. And those are our coworkers who are risking their lives and dying. 

REIN: One thing I would say is that there is some sort of movement towards unions for tech workers. So there's the Tech Workers Coalition. But historically, trade unions divide workers in the same factory into separate competing groups. And actually, this benefits the people who own the factory. What you want is everyone in the factory organizing together. And so, I think tech workers need to broaden our horizons and try to think about solidarity outside of our own ingroup.

ELLEN: Yeah, I agree. I feel like that was what I was saying. Yes?

REIN: Yeah. I think I was trying to 'yes, and' you. 

ELLEN: Okay, cool. Yeah. Yey!

[Laughter]

JOHN: Bringing it back to the shareholder versus stakeholder divide. It strikes me that the increasing collective action in the United States could be a lever to start changing that cultural predetermination of moving in the direction of stakeholder value rather than shareholder value, because if the workers can organize and craft a narrative about the impact of that organization, we can start redefining what business is supposed to be doing.

ELLEN: Yeah, I think that's true. I also think, too, that we're kind of heading in that direction a little bit anyway, even before this leg of the movement started, just because of some of our increasing inter-alliance as well. I mean, there are chairmen -- like it is an increasingly international world. We have a lot of chairmen in American companies who are working together or tech companies that are German and American working together, too. I know that I have spoken with people who worked at international companies that were talking about some of the interactions that they had there and or some of their experiences and just some of their experiences bringing the culture across. But yes, I do think that's true.

I think also that it's true because -- I think it was, I don't remember actually if it was John or Rein. I think was Rein who's talking about the narrative that we had about unions. One of you is talking about the narrative that we had about unions earlier and about who gets to have a union. But we also have this sort of narrative about working towns and about how a town with coal is the lifeblood of the town. And I feel like that's a very sort of stakeholder community sort of idea. And so with that kind of idea coming back in of a town that has an industry with its lifeblood, that's not a shareholder concept. That's not something that's like, "Oh, yeah. The guy at the top is making all the money and getting the best from that." And so, I feel like we're bringing that back around some.

REIN: What can people do next? Like what should people come away from this podcast thinking about?

ELLEN: I think that people should come away from the podcast thinking about their coworkers and their relation to workers and to themself as a working person differently. I think that we need to kind of interrogate our place in the working world again. And it's very uncomfortable, and I understand that. Every time I talk about this, I get someone DMing me with some very mean things, but I understand that it's uncomfortable. But we need to come out of this thinking about just sort of as tech workers, like what is our place in the world and how can we make it better? Because like it or not, we're here. We're making an impact and we can choose to keep making that impact towards the shareholders. We can choose to keep building shareholder values. We can choose to keep holding those values sort of sacrosanct, or we can choose to start enshrining some different values. And we can look at where we stand in the world a little bit differently. So, yes, I think that would be what I would hope would be a takeaway as just kind of evaluate where you are. And I understand it's real hard, especially now that everyone is struggling, but everyone is struggling. And please don't message me mean things for saying that. [Laughs]

JOHN: It reminds me of Anjuan Simmons has a wonderful talk that he's given for a couple of years now called Lending Privilege, where he talks about those of us on the high end of the privileged scale can use that power to lift people up, to lend our privilege to defend or to give people that don't have that privilege additional power to make changes or to do what they need to do. And by the same token, the industry itself, all of us workers collectively, we're in a very privileged part of the working world. We can lend that privilege. We can lift the unions up. We can use the comfortable positions we have to make everybody's life easier.

ELLEN: And ideally too, when we do that, our positions become safer as well. I mean, that should not be the goal. That's not what we're aiming for. But in helping others, we also too help ourselves. That's not the point of helping people, but it's a fun perk.

REIN: So thinking about, earlier when we were talking about relationships and talking about collective power in the sort of vein of thinking globally and acting locally, I would urge folks listening to this to start talking to their coworkers and to start building the sorts of connections that you may need to rely on later.

One form of resilience is what David Woods describes as network architectures that can sustain the ability to adapt. And so, that is something that happens in biology, in human body. It's something that happens among people. And so, if you want to work collectively with your coworkers, the very first step, I think, is connecting with them as coworkers and talking about your shared challenges and then having this well to draw in more usually later when you might need it.

ELLEN: Excellent.

REIN: I would also add that you should find ways to dip your toes into the pool of worker power. We may not be able to get workers on the board of directors in your company in the US, but Russell Ackoff, the management consultant operational research person, has a thing he calls the manager board. And what that is, is a manager has a board that they are responsible and responsive to. That board includes that manager is boss, but also everyone that reports to that manager. And that board ideally determines whether that manager gets to keep their job, or get a raise or what their manager needs to do differently to properly support their reports. If you can get your manager to meet with your team on a regular basis to discuss the needs of your team, that is a step in that direction.

ELLEN: Yes.

JOHN: Yeah, that's a good start. It's interesting to me thinking about this, and I definitely don't have any good answers here. But as a manager myself, I'm sort of stuck a little bit in two different worlds because I think the company thinks of me as now a boss, but I think of myself as a worker. And threading that needle as far as what I'm advocating for, or how do I talk to my reports about labor rights, things like that, that's an interesting and thicket of things to explore.

ELLEN: Yeah, it's very tough. I think that there's definitely a point where you realize that you have to just start listening and advocating and stop thinking of yourself in as many ways as possible, which is hard as an incredibly, incredibly [weigh] person, [inaudible]. Like what do you need? What can I help with? How can I help you with my privilege? But yes, it's a hard line to walk for sure.

REIN: Also for any managers that are listening to this podcast, hello. Thank you for listening. One of the advantages to a manager board for you is that you know how difficult it is to translate high level strategy into day to day operations. And the manager board connects up to five levels of your organizational hierarchy and makes it much easier for people at different levels of your organization to know what other people are doing. And so, it will also help you, by the way.

JOHN: Indeed. So, when we come to the end of an episode, we'd like to go into what we call reflections, which are just a simple distillation of the ideas that really struck us, that were discussed here or the things we're going to take away with us or things to just need to think about more. I think for me, this episode has been just a good reminder of the value of collective action, and actually, Rein's emphasis of that as the core of organization and unions and those sorts of things is really, for me, powerful, almost reframe or just at least re-emphasis of that aspect of it that feels good to me and that feels worth remembering.

REIN: So my reflection is two things. Tech workers are workers and workers have more in common with other workers than they do with bosses.

ELLEN: Nice.

REIN: That's it.

ELLEN: I know that I personally need to spend more time thinking about the practical ways of implementing collective action in tech because I care about it a lot. That's very important.

REIN: Yes, practice a thing that is good.

JOHN: I have one bonus reflection. One topic we didn't actually get a chance to dive into but which I think would have been really interesting is your work with tech and fiber arts. And so, I wanted to throw out a call to, like it was episode 80 that we did about a couple years ago with Kris Howard called Crafting a Community. I'll post a link here in the chat and Mandy can put it in the show notes. But that episode also talked about technology and fiber arts and the difference between what crafters and makers and why that's a weirdly gendered distinction art. It's a fascinating episode.

ELLEN: Excellent. I would love to check that out. I love talking about gender and craft and art.

JOHN: If you've enjoyed this conversation and would like to have more conversations like this with the people who enjoy listening to this episode, as well as the panelists, you can join our Slack group. The best way to do that is to contribute on our Patreon, which is at Patreon.com/GreaterThanCode. Contributing any amount will get you an invite to our Slack group.

Special note: because times are tough right now with the pandemic raging, they're all around us, and especially with people losing jobs due to the virus, we have opened up free entry to our community. Those of you who want to join, we've got pretty active jobs channel where we're sharing links and information. And so, reach out to any one of us on Twitter, DM, whatever, and we can get you an invite to the community and you can join us there.

REIN: Also, if you have a job and want to freely advertise that job, you can come to that.

ELLEN: When you're trying to get someone to [inaudible].

REIN: Yes, a job opening. Sorry. [Inaudible] about having a job.

JOHN: A little bit maybe.

ELLEN: Just a little bit. 

JOHN: Well, thank you so much, Ellen. It was great talking to you. 

ELLEN: Great, you too.