High Tech And Whole Systems Change. Can we change an industry from the bottom up?

Here in Seattle Washington we are in the midst of forming a new organization (Washington Alliance of Technology Workers) in an attempt to change the mechanistic business model used by an entire industry and to give a voice to the thousands of high tech contract workers and "perma-temps" in the Industry.

For those of you not familiar with this practice it is becoming increasingly common for high tech employers to use contract employees for a large portion of their work (over 5,200 of us are contractors out of 18,000 total at Microsoft)and they rarely have any voice in either their workplace, with their contract agencies, or in the issues that affect them. Microsoft uses a mechanistic mind set where they view contract employees as disposable pieces of equipment.

Although in many cases we are paid a little better than permanent employees (in spite of a new state Labor and Industry ordiance that Microsoft sponsored that prohibits over-time for high-tech workers)but most of us are more concerned in issues of fairness, being heard, feeling like you have some control over your future, etc that are important to us.

In response to this we formed WashTech and we recently drafted our first set of bylaws which has a flat participatory organizational structure (you can read them on our web site)with small groups formed by both location and interest and will be holding many of our meetings online. We are only six months old but we already have 1200 people on our mailing lists and up to 2300 hits per day on our web site (washtech.org, have been contacted by national labor organizations, received press coverage,met with members of congress even been served with legal papers, so we know we are on the edge of something profound.

We are niave enough to believe that we can implement systems thinking not only at one company but across an entire industry and we are trying to empower indiviual professionals while working on issues on the local, state and federal level. Hopefully I will be returning to graduate school this fall in Whole Systems Design (my first degrees are in Engineering and Finance) but we are at a critical stage in our development and we would love any support or encouragement you can offer. (hmm what a great case study you might be thinking)

Sherry Reynolds Apprentice Visionary

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