Excellent. I had the same thought on reading "Dear God Do Not Resign".
I think developers are very unlikely to fire strikers over safety concerns. It would be an extremely bad look.
Here's a thought: it might work better to picket other developers instead of or in addition to your own.
Going on strike, even a little, would be pretty scary for the individuals involved. Getting ostracized socially would suck. So giving the message "we're not against you or us (this developer), we're against unsafe practices and racing everywhere. We're picketing equally here and at the other guys, and we're targeting government calls for full speed ahead as well as developers".
Good call on existing labor organizers wanting to help. There's no better cause for organized labor than slowing down AI (since it's likely to take jobs and make conditions worse at scale).
I hope there's a way for potential strikers to dip their toes in before risking their whole jobs; posting their doubts on social media is a start (if it's low-risk; I think OpenAI and Anthropic are remarkably permissive on posting personal opinions).
The traditional labor method for these things is to quietly get signups and commitments from people in one-on-one conversations, then reveal both your demands and the number of people you have on side all at once. The more participants, the safer it is for each individual to strike, because it becomes costlier to the employer to fire and replace that many people at the same time.
I have no intuition for how likely a frontier lab would be to retain a union-busting consultant, but modern union training methods have adapted to adversarial environments, and since this won't be a traditional strike for things like working conditions or pay, many traditional union-busting tactics wouldn't work.
Right. I'm actually thinking of a strike without particular demands. This is just sort of demonstrating on company time, so maybe not even what OP was addressing.
Some specific demands might be better in some sense, but I think it's really useful to keep the bar really low for initial participation.
Unfortunately true in much white-collar work. Slowdowns work better in physical environments like shipyards and assembly lines.
Sometimes work-to-rule is better, but you need to coordinate to all be doing it at the same time. Working to rule in the absence of an agreed-upon collective action just makes you annoying.
I read Dear God, Please Do Not Resign In Protest and wanted to point out that leftists have a mature and relatively reliable set of strategies to address the problem of how to get a lot of people to stop working in protest at the same time.
Then I did a search of LW to see if someone else brought unions up already, read What if AI safety labs unionized?, and flinched at the repeated citation of reasons why a union isn't the correct legal structure and the absurdly complicated legal structure that was being suggested instead.
Here's the thing, though - I've done enough work with union people to know that you don't need to go through the traditional channels. You don't need to have a majority vote supervised by the NLRB; pre-majority unionism is a legitimate strategy. You don't need to be striking for a contract; you can just be striking for an individual concession. A strike does not have to be leaving the workplace and making a picket line; work slowdowns or still doing work and just giving it away for free can be effective too (the latter is technically illegal but can be scarily effective). You don't need to have an official union structure backing you; wildcat strikes happen all the time. You don't even have to want to start a union at all.
All you really need for a strike is something unacceptable happening, and people deciding to walk out together because of it. Everything else is fluff.
If you're reading this and need help going from "disgruntled" to "collective action", the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee gives one-on-one mentorship on how to start doing union-adjacent work, up to and including providing and roleplaying social scripts (you'd be surprised how necessary that often ends up being). At the moment, they respond within 48 hours to most inquiries. Usually they focus on building up collective power privately in the back first, but if you make it clear this is a flashpoint and you need to seize the moment, they'll work with that too.
(I'm mostly hoping this somehow gets sent to a privately disgruntled frontier lab employee, but it would also be cool to expand other people's minds on the way there.)