Marcus Courtney in Seattle last week.

Marcus Courtney, a one-time Microsoft contract worker, left his job as president of the Seattle-based WashTech technology labor union last year for a new position at the UNI Global Union in Switzerland. He left without fanfare, but he was back in Seattle visiting relatives for the holidays, and we got a chance to sit down with him.

Courtney, 38, has been replaced at WashTech by new president Les French. Last week, over coffee in Seattle's Greenwood neighborhood, Courtney reflected on WashTech's attempts to organize Microsoft employees, discussed the current Microsoft layoff rumors, and explained how his perspective has changed since taking an international role.

Continue reading for excerpts from the conversation.

Q: What happened to you, Marcus?

Courtney: I was in Seattle for 14 years and ran the WashTech local for 10 years. I was offered a job with Uni Global Union, which is a global federation of the world’s largest service-sector unions. ... I’m head of the telecommunications sector, which has 3.5 million members throughout the world.

Q: How do you feel about your legacy at WashTech?

Courtney: When we started we had no members, no money, no subscribers, no national affiliation, and then after 10 years, we had 1,400 members -- 1,100 we organized at AT&T Wireless -- and 17,000 Internet subscribers from across the country. Built up a reputation for advocacy and organizing technology workers in the country. ...

We were really the first workers in the country that launched real collective bargaining drives at Microsoft, and had groups of workers signed up under the union, going to management saying they wanted to be represented under a contract. That is pretty incredible to think about. … It was radical in a lot of ways. We were highlighting the fact that the industry was very unequal in terms of pay and treatment for different kinds of workers for the same kind of work. We really were helping point out the inequities that were existing in the technology economy at a time when it was unbelievably flush.

Q: But the original goal of actually having collective bargaining and a union at Microsoft …

Courtney: Never came to pass. No, it never came to pass.

Q: Why not, and what does that tell you?

Courtney: Even the history of the labor movement is not a quick rise and fall. It’s a long-term process, and there’s a lot of opposition. One thing I think my international experience is bringing to me is that other countries around the world do not have such hostility toward the idea of workers organizing. And one of the biggest obstacles in the United States to workers being able to freely choose the union is that management wants to make that decision for them. Management runs campaigns telling employees they don’t want to do it, threatening them with intimidation, and that helps dampen the ability of workers to freely form their own organizations and associations for their economic interest. 

Can’t say Microsoft did any aggressive anti-union campaigns, obviously. We were dealing with the contractors and the temporary agencies would say, ‘Go talk to Microsoft,’ and Microsoft would say, ‘Go talk to them.’ But the law was clearly an obstacle because the employment status – who’s the employer of temporary workers? -- is still very ill-defined under labor law. There’s a lot of legal obstacles in place that I think thwart the abilities of workers to join unions.

Q: You targeted contract workers, but didn’t you ultimately aspire to organize Microsoft’s permanent workforce?

Courtney: I think we always ultimately aspired that full-time employees would want to assert their bargaining rights and come together in a collective fashion. Contract workers were a starting point.

In labor politics and labor economics, in a broader sense, people want to say, well, people make good money or they have good benefits, like that’s the only thing that drives union representation. But there’s a lot of other things. There’s the issue of whether people have a say over how they work, or what that compensation is. You can’t look at somebody and say, oh, they make a good salary, therefore they don’t need a union. I think that’s a very narrow, conservative approach, not recognizing that bargaining rights are a universal freedom. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a well-compensated technology employee or a home-health care worker, everybody has a right to have a contract and a union. I think that does apply to technology workers. That’s not really thought of in this country or in many parts of the world.

Yeah, we didn’t succeed the first time, but at some point those workers at Microsoft can make a different decision, and they should have the freedom to make that decision on their own, free from management saying that they don’t want a union.

Q: You’ve been in Switzerland for the past six months, so you might not be as plugged into this as you normally were, but there are widespread rumors of possible layoffs at Microsoft. No confirmation, just rumors at this point. How might things be different in this kind of circumstance had the workforce unionized there?

Courtney: One of the things that obviously could be different is that they would know exactly what would be going on. The company can’t just walk in one day and dramatically lay off thousands of workers without any kind of notice and without a sense of, if you were to get laid off, what your package would look like, or what would your health care be, and things like that.

One of the things with contractors, and even with full-time Microsoft employees, they could maybe advocate that there be no layoffs, in a collective fashion, and say, Hey, what are things we can do differently to try to avoid layoffs? Obviously in a place like Seattle you don’t want companies laying off right now, because it feeds on this downward economic spiral in terms of people having less money to purchase goods and services, the housing market, all those sorts of things, and Microsoft’s a very important employer. ...

If there are going to be layoffs, they could talk about, what does that mean? How long will their health-care last? What is their severance package going to look like? What are their retraining benefits? If the company hires again, what is the process by which the hiring is done, as well as the layoffs? Who is going to get laid off? Is it based on seniority? Are there other factors that management can consider? Those kinds of things. Without the union contract, it’s the ultimate power of management to terminate employees. 

When you look at the financial crisis and see how companies are actually destroying value and hurting the economy and not adding value, it shows that we need important safeguards and checks against management power.

Q: Some of the issues that you dealt with here, from a U.S. perspective, were offshoring, H-1B Visas and protecting American technology jobs. Now that you’re at the international level, how has your perspective changed?

Courtney: [Laughs.] You know, that’s a really good question. I would say that American unions and American workers have a little more unique perspective than other parts of the world. And I’ve gotten in big debates about this.

I do come now from this more global, international perspective. … In Europe, I’ve had probably my most detailed discussions about it. I’ve also had the opportunity to travel to places in Africa, and India, where a lot of the offshoring takes place, and hear the perspectives there. I think I’m getting a broader perspective.

In Europe, they can’t understand the intensity of the offshoring debate as much, because economic liberalization that’s happening in Europe happened originally very differently than in the United States. There was strong support for creating the European Union, for having a more unified Europe, but they wanted to do it recognizing the social implications of that, and actually bringing the social aspects into the debate, and recognizing that those were just as strong considerations as the economic aspects. They weren’t just talking about economic freedom, which is what you hear in the U.S. with the free-trade agreements. It’s all about business concerns, and then we’ll deal with the social consequences later, if ever. …

The other thing is, when you talk with employers there (in Europe), they actually will talk about market failure. This is the incredible thing. You will sit across the table from employers, and they will say, from their perspective, if we have ‘a market failure’ in some aspects then we should have appropriate regulation to deal with the market failure. That’s unheard of in the United States, in our current political environment. Maybe that will be changing in terms of some of this (financial crisis). But the idea of employers and businesses saying, if the market does fail, we need appropriate regulation, and they’re willing to talk about the fact that the unions and government have a positive role to play -- it’s a very different environment over there.

Q: One of the most fascinating things that happened to you in the last few years at WashTech was the anonymous packages you started getting with internal Microsoft documents. Did you ever figure out who was leaving those?

Courtney: No, I never knew who the Deep Throats were. I think that showed we were seen as a credible voice, if people gave us information that we would credibly put out that information from the perspective of what the employees’ concerns were and do it in a responsible fashion. I think that was really a reflection of a lot of the credibility we had gained over time. We were using the Internet, and we were talking with mainstream media, and we were building that voice.

And I think that unions, not just here in the United States but all over the world, need to gain that power and understand they have to be much more creative about being a source of information – not only for workers generally but also for the news media. That’s a really important role, especially now that we’re seeing more turmoil in the media.

We were right on, I think, in pointing out that what Microsoft might be saying wasn’t necessarily the whole story. There are two sides to every story, and workers certainly might not share the same opinion as management.

Even though you’ve moved on, can you talk about WashTech currently?

Courtney: Yeah, I think things are going very well. I just had lunch with the local on Tuesday. Things are going very well, they still are actively trying to organize workers, and they just tried to organize 175 folks at AT&T in the tech center, the IT group there. That was our second attempt, it didn’t come out, but they’re still actively organizing. They have a new, great local president, Les French, who’s head of the team, and there’s still a good board. It’s a very good mix of folks, and I think it’s going to have a good, solid future.

Q: Based on your own experience, do you think there’s any chance that employees at Microsoft will ever unionize?

Courtney: Of course. I think it’s just a natural thing. People have a lot of value to add and, absent a union, it becomes a very unilateral conversation. It becomes what management wants. They can more easily discount the input of employees.

Increasing the quality of the product is a big thing you’ll hear among educated professional employees. It’s not just about work for them. It’s not all about money. How are we going to improve product quality? What is a new way of doing this, a better way of doing this? I think unions can add a lot of value in that sense.