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On the Clock is Motherboard's reporting on the organized labor movement, gig work, automation, and the future of work.
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The story behind the most successful effort to use job applications against employers began last summer when Texas passed a law that made illegal to aid abortion-seekers who were more than six weeks pregnant. At the time, Sean Wiggs, a 21-year-old coder and TikTok influencer from North Carolina wrote a script that spammed a Texas anti-abortion, where people could to report those who violated the new law. In less than two weeks, thousands of people spammed the website and it was taken down. In December, when Kellogg’s workers went on strike at all Kellogg’s cereal facilities, Wiggs saw an opportunity to tailor his code to Kellogg’s applications for strikebreakers, or so-called jobs. Within days, the movement “exploded” on Reddit, and Kellogg’s shut down the job application portal, Wiggs says.Since then, Wiggs has joined an organization called Gen-Z For Change, where he and other coders regularly ask their 1.5 million TikTok followers to spam anti-union employers with fake job applications. Earlier this year, as part of their campaign called Change is Brewing, Wiggs wrote a script that has been used to spam Starbucks with more than 140,000 fake job applications for positions at stores where union organizers have been fired and openings for union-buster positions. Postings for Starbucks jobs in Buffalo and Ithaca, New York and Memphis, Tennessee, have since been taken down.
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