ON THE LINE, ONLINE
How Kickstarter Workers Organized a Fully Remote Strike

Just days before our strike was set to begin, the Contract Action Team had to move quickly to figure out a format to accommodate our fully remote shop. There was no technical need to assemble together in order to stop production, but we understood that a picket of some form would offer an essential element of collectivity or solidarity for our action. We didn’t have an office to picket in front of and our workers are across the country. We asked, how does a striking union picket over Zoom? A staffer sent us a sample picket line schedule for a nurses’ strike, and I adapted it as best I could for the bargaining unit. Our daily schedule for the 42 days of striking was as follows:

11am: Strike captains and the bargaining committee met to go over the plan for the day and process insights from the day prior.

12pm: All striking workers met on Zoom to play an ice breaker game, discuss updates, hold Q&As using a rapid polling tool, and discuss breakout room activities. Each member chose their preferred project to work on, such as proposal writing, Twitch streaming to aid our fundraising, and social media strategizing.

3pm: Activity breakout rooms closed and we opened our union Zoom up to the public. Striking workers gave speeches, and one or two guest speakers gave a talk.

4pm or later: Bargaining, if we could get management to the table that day.

A highlight among the breakout room projects was, broadly, “paperwork,” perhaps the least visible (and, honestly, the most tedious) aspect of our strike. But working through many pages of unemployment and later COBRA forms allowed us to solve a practical problem together and take care of each other in a way that bolstered our open-ended strike viability.

This format served our needs and kept us out on strike until we won, but there are a few changes I’d recommend for the next remote shop to go on strike.

One, I would have planned for a strike much earlier, perhaps before we even started bargaining. Much of the strike preparation was done just weeks or days before our strike, but we would have been much more prepared to answer our coworkers’ most pressing questions and lightened the load of strike leadership, especially just before and just after the strike started.

I’d also recommend a plan for combatting Zoom fatigue. Yes, workers in distributed shops are used to long days at a computer. But hours of collaborating synchronously during what for most of us was the most stressful event of our lives took its toll, especially in the first few weeks where there was no end to the work stoppage in sight. Weeks into our strike we eventually took “touch grass” days fully away from Zoom to volunteer in our respective communities. Next time I’d incorporate these offline days much earlier and perhaps even consider the idea of a more asynchronous strike. Do we need to be on Zoom together for 4+ hours every single day of a strike? Can we work on our strike projects on our own time instead of in a breakout room? Spending a few hours on Zoom every day in the early days was important to manage our collective fears and foster cohesion, but I don’t think the same daily format is necessary weeks or months into an open-ended strike.

In addition to what we’d change, it’s also worth reflecting on what went well with this hastily planned format. Finding a way to hold anonymous Q&As and host rapid polls was key to understanding the needs and desires of the unit. This allowed strike leadership to ensure all major (and many minor) decisions were made democratically.

As more and more distributed shops build toward work stoppages, we as organizers must continue to adapt existing strategies to best support our coworkers on the picket line. Solidifying our remote strike programming is crucial for sustaining an open-ended strike and increasing our leverage at the bargaining table.

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