I am a unionist who creates technical systems to build worker power.
I currently serve as the data director for the California Fast Food Workers Union, where I have been laying the technical foundation for the campaign to transition to a state-wide local union within SEIU — overhauling the member management and research databases, setting up data warehousing, building out an event-driven architecture for data integration, and creating lightweight applications that let the field execute on new organizing ideas.
For the larger labor movement, I maintain labordata, a public data warehouse of government administrative records about unions and the labor movement, including NLRB cases, OLMS LM filings, OSHA investigations, and FMCS intent-to-bargain notices. The labordata warehouse has been used in research that estimates how much employers spend to avoid unions, measures the relationship between labor market tightness and union activity, as well as my own looks at the CRM market for labor unions and changing conditions for NLRB elections.
I also co-organize the Union Data and Technology Conference, a conference for the technology and data workers who build and maintain the technical systems of the labor movement. The conference gives this field of workers a venue to learn from one another and critically reflect on our own work within the labor movement.
Prior to joining the labor movement, I co-led DataMade, a web and data consultancy for civil society, for over 10 years. I helped grow the company from two people to seven, developed beginner programmers into senior developers, directed award-winning projects in journalism and government, and developed popular open-source software including dedupe, the most widely-used open-source record-linkage library.