When Polaroid Workers fought Apartheid

(From 2020) Michael McCanne for Dissent Magazine write about When Polaroid Workers Fought Apartheid:

On October 8, 1970, some 200 people gathered for a protest in Technology Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Student protests were common in Cambridge, but this one was different: many of the attendees were workers from the nearby Polaroid headquarters, protesting the company’s business with the apartheid government in South Africa.

Polaroid¹ workers protested the business done with the South African Government in the times of the Apartheid. One of the slogans was “Polaroid imprisons black people in sixty seconds”, and this as Polaroid supplied the white South African Government with the means to create passbooks used to enforce Apartheid segregation.

After years of lies and denials, and firings, the movement lead to changes at Polaroid and further boycott by other corporation of South Africa under the Apertheid. Labour movement are strong.

In today’s context, we have seen tech being used for oppression and genocide, and employees trying to leverage for these to change. Between companies that just happen to also sell to oppressors and those created to do so, tech is political because tech is a mean. And none of this is new.