Harris does a good job with a story close to that outline. Her setting and details are pleasing: hollowed-out Detroit, with a steady trickle of praise for the beautifully detailed Fischer building, surviving in a society with 50% unemployment; a few corporate sharks and a lot of labor getting driven down the scale to temps. Birth of a union, birth of an Overmind, subtle assumptions about the relation between embodiment and cognition. If Eric Raymond's screed about shrill economic-libertarian tracts always selling to SF readers didn't convince you either, try this.