The Strike at the Bottom of the Stack

About a dozen workers walked out of a Micron plant in Taoyuan in October. One day, one shift, barely enough people for a picket line. It was also the first strike in the history of Taiwan's semiconductor industry, which sounds like a labour-history footnote until you hear what the union president said.

Jerry Lin, who leads Micron's Taoyuan union, told Rest of World: "Making a profit is perfectly fine, but the rank and file should get a share of the profit instead of this unequal distribution between high-level executives and the rank and file."

Read that again. He isn't saying the machines should stop. He isn't asking anyone to protect him from AI. He's perfectly happy for Micron to make a profit, which it has, handsomely, all year, on AI servers' appetite for memory. He wants the split redone.

I've been turning this over all week, because our argument about AI and work is stuck on one question: will it take my job? The Micron workers are asking the other one, the question that will decide how this decade actually feels: who gets what the boom produces?

And I think a very old rule is quietly settling the answer.

Wherever the boom physically concentrates, wherever it needs something that can't be copied, moved, or shrugged off, that's where bargaining power collects.

The bottom of the stack

In the usual diagram, AI is a stack: models on top, hardware underneath. The glamour is at the top. The leverage is at the bottom.

Micron employs more than 15,000 people in Taiwan and makes over 60% of its DRAM there, the memory AI servers are currently desperate for. TSMC, further down the island, makes about 90% of the world's most advanced semiconductors and, by Rest of World's account, 99% of the chips used to train frontier AI models. Semiconductors are more than a fifth of Taiwan's GDP.

Software can be copied and shipped anywhere overnight. A fab can't. When the boom needs something that exists in only a handful of places on earth, the people standing in those places inherit leverage, whether or not anyone drew them a diagram.

It arrived fast. Membership in Micron's two Taiwanese unions went from around 440 to more than 13,000 in a few months. The Taoyuan local alone has over 2,300 members and can still strike. As Wu Yu-ren of National Chung Cheng University put it, "soaring demand for high-end memory has driven up share prices and corporate profits, making workers question how those gains are distributed."

The Taiwanese playbook is old: generous bonuses to discourage unions, white-collar workers job-hopping instead of organising. What broke it was comparison. Workers at Samsung and SK Hynix in South Korea had already won profit-sharing agreements. If the Koreans got a share, why not us? A demand becomes unstoppable the moment it stops being a grievance and becomes a template.

The other chokepoint holders

Here's why I think this is bigger than one plant. The same week, across the Pacific, the boom ran into another thing it can't copy or move: the permission of the people who live near the buildings.

On election day, Americans voted on measures to restrict data centres in their towns and cities. In all but one race, restriction passed or was on track to pass. Ohio alone had 21 towns and cities voting on it. Sherrod Brown, winning back his Senate seat, told his victory crowd: "I do not work for the utility companies. I do not work for data centers. I do not work for Wall Street. I work for you, I work for Ohio."

Within a day, OpenAI announced it would stop using NDAs with public officials on data centre projects, pay "the full cost" of the electricity it uses and the infrastructure needed to serve it, and give every future "compute campus" a "local compact." Amazon made a similar NDA pledge in October.

These are announcements with no numbers attached, and nobody should confuse a pledge with a delivered school or a smaller power bill. But look at the direction of travel. Two of the biggest names in the industry are volunteering to give up the secrecy they used to rely on. That's what a concession looks like before it has terms.

The same technology, opposite outcomes

Also this week, Canva laid off or asked to relocate 22% of its workforce, about 1,200 people, because AI is battering the design business from both sides: the cost of building AI features, and users making visual assets with other AI tools instead. Melanie Perkins called it "without doubt the hardest moment in our 13-year history" and concluded that "small changes won't be enough."

Same boom, opposite outcomes. Where the AI economy meets work the tools can now do, people are being cut. Where it meets work sitting on top of something physical and irreplaceable, workers gain the standing to demand a share.

The dividing line isn't skill, or education, or how close your desk sits to a GPU. It's immovability. Can software do what you do, or does the boom need something only you and your fab can supply? The Micron workers aren't winning because they're cleverer than the Canva designers. They're winning because their leverage can't be copied.

The market noticed too

Thursday's global rout gets described as fear that AI would fail. Read what the analysts actually said and it's the opposite: fear that AI would be slowed down. The Nasdaq fell 5.5%, shedding an estimated $2.5 trillion and sliding into correction territory. In Seoul the Kospi plunged more than 8% at one point and triggered a circuit breaker; SK Hynix lost more than a tenth of its value in a day.

What rattled investors, on the reporting, was that a Democratic Congress might restrict data centre development and slow the buildout. "The AI story has all been about speed," said AJ Bell's Dan Coatsworth, "and now there is a danger of it moving to a lower gear, and some of the wheels falling off."

Same story, different costume. The market is pricing permission. If a town can say no to a data centre, and a union can slow a fab, then land, grid connections, zoning votes and clean-room know-how are inputs to the AI boom exactly like chips and electricity. Owners of scarce inputs can charge for them or refuse them. That isn't a culture-war side effect drifting through the earnings call. It's the cost structure of the boom rearranging itself.

Greg Brockman of OpenAI, asked about the backlash, was admirably blunt: "from San Francisco trying to build infrastructure in Texas, Georgia, and other places, you can't just tweet and say: 'This is going to be good.' You need to be in those communities."

What could make me wrong

The counterweight belongs in plain view.

The leverage is structural but untested. The Taoyuan strike was one symbolic day. TrendForce's Ellie Wang thinks a brief stoppage's main consequence would be "heightened customer concern over delivery reliability," not a supply crisis. And management is already working the angles. Micron reached a deal with the Taichung union on October 22 for higher salaries, quarterly bonuses and bigger pension contributions, only for many members to reject it as a secret stitch-up, while Taoyuan's majority called the terms unsatisfying and kept its right to strike. A union surge that fractures along plant lines is one management can outlast.

The window could close, too. If the memory shortage eases, or the capital-expenditure slowdown now worrying markets bites, the margins that make a share worth demanding will shrink with it. Bargaining power built on boom-time scarcity expires when the scarcity does.

And the state turning up cuts both ways. Taiwan's president, Lai Ching-te, attended Micron's new Taichung plant and urged both sides toward agreement: "Corporations and employees should help each other like fish and water." Lovely sentiment, and also a head of state walking into a labour dispute because, as former labour minister Pan Shih-wei says, "Taiwan has traditionally relied on government intervention for labor disputes, and companies lack established channels for dialogue with workers." A settlement brokered from above isn't bargaining power, and it can quietly substitute for it.

The upgrade signal I'm watching

If TSMC workers ever move from talk to action, this stops being a story about one plant. They make almost all the chips frontier AI is trained on, and earlier this year they discussed unionising and striking over pay. A second fab organising, or a profit-sharing deal at Taoyuan on the Korean model, and this becomes a pattern rather than a hunch.

For now, look at how visible the gains have become to the people whose fabs and towns make them possible. Rest of World notes that US startups have minted 19 new billionaires worth a combined $59 billion in the past year, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, while Anthropic prepares what could be the world's biggest IPO, valuing the company at nearly $2 trillion. Nobody in Taoyuan needs that explained.

The Micron workers aren't asking the future to slow down. Jerry Lin is fine with the profit. He wants the split redone. If this decade's politics of AI gets settled in bargaining rooms and zoning boards instead of on podcasts about the singularity, that may be the sanest version of the argument available. Keep your eye on the bottom of the stack.