Paper short abstract:

This paper considers one labor union’s campaign to develop, evaluate, and eventually certify “union-approved” IT equipment in the 1980s as a case of transnational, labor-centric environmental knowledge practices within a context of information technology and multinational corporate capitalism.

Paper long abstract:

As personal computers transformed many white-collar workplaces in the 1980s, a host of new health-related concerns emerged: as Laine Nooney (2022) outlines, personal computers were breaking the human body with repetitive strain injury, eye discomfort, and fears of electromagnetic radiation from video display terminals. How did office workers around the world respond to these new working conditions? In Sweden, where union membership was at an all-time high, labor unions were tasked with evaluating the danger of these new tools and bargaining for safer conditions. TCO, Sweden’s union of white-collar workers, decided to negotiate with the electronics manufacturers themselves. This paper considers TCO’s campaign to develop, evaluate, and eventually certify “union-approved” IT equipment as a case of transnational, labor-centric knowledge practices operating within a context of information technology and multinational corporate capitalism. TCO created tools like “Screen Checker,” translated into nine languages, for employees to evaluate certain exposures and contact manufacturers to request information about others. By the mid-1990s, TCO had successfully influenced several of the world’s largest electronics companies—including IBM, Samsung, and Nokia—to manufacture products that followed stricter health and environment guidelines. Drawing on original archival research, this paper argues that TCO’s tools are instructive for understanding how environmental knowledge practices get embedded in media and technologies.