The San Francisco Examiner wrote this week about labor activists working towards unionization within ranks of major tech companies, for both improvement of their working conditions and leverage among tech’s working class against its billionaires. Despite big tech’s historically successful union-busting efforts, the past decade has built momentum towards changing that: most visibly, Alphabet and Microsoft’s workers are now unionized. The Examiner spoke with a member of the Tech Workers Coalition who said early-stage unionization efforts are underway across several of San Francisco’s major tech companies as we speak.
They don’t name the companies, for obvious reasons — the same reasons “Lucas,” their source who is also part of a unionization effort within his own tech company, is not named Lucas. Firing a worker for trying to unionize is a federal crime, but it’s not news that it happens all the time.
It happened to Clarissa Redwine.
She and her colleague JS Tan co-authored a book —Against Tech Oligarchy, releasing this Tuesday — detailing the history of labor unions in tech, telling their personal stories from Kickstarter, Microsoft, and Twitter, among others, analyzing what the movement has done right and wrong so far, and laying out the stakes and necessity of its persistence. They have both been visible faces and names in tech organizing this decade. Both experienced slow-building catalysts in their early tech careers that led to them confronting the gap between the industry they thought they were entering, and the one they were actually contributing to.
In 2020, Kickstarter became the first white-collar tech workforce in American history to successfully unionize. The summer before, at the height of the company’s union-busting efforts, management fired three of the most visible union advocates and organizers. Redwine was one of them, and was fired right after her most successful quarter to date. The illegal retaliatory firings had the opposite of their intended effect, and won over some employees who had been on the fence about unionization. The next February, Redwine gathered inside the National Labor Relations Board’s Brooklyn office alongside her former colleagues to hold their breath as they watched the vote be tallied. When one of the lead organizers turned and held up his notebook with the tally, she leapt out of her chair.
“After I was fired for organizing, I became somewhat known in this tight-knit community of tech organizers as someone who’s been through the fire and experienced retaliation,” Redwine told me. “And once JS blew the whistle and wrote this piece about Microsoft accelerating climate change, he was experiencing some heat from that. And JS had been working on this archive Collective Action in Tech for a while, and invited me to contribute.”
Tan remembers the Kickstarter union as a visible turning point for tech workers organizing within their companies.
JS Tan came out of undergrad in the mid-2010s with a computer science degree and belief that technology had great potential to be beneficial to society; he cited the democratic nature of social media as one example. The optimistic nature of tech’s culture of that era, they write, was intentionally appealing to its workers. Mottos like “Move fast and break things” and Google’s now infamously abandoned “Don’t be evil” set an industry ethos of upending the status quo in the name of building a better world.
Tan’s disillusionment with that culture had been building for a while during his time at Microsoft. “[Microsoft Cloud] was a division that was, for the most part, less talked about until recently,” he told me. “You know, in the 2010s, the focus was on these consumer apps, these platforms, social media, whereas I was working in the Cloud computing sector that was this quietly growing— and, arguably today, the most important part — of Microsoft, and this was the division that was the reason the company was contracting with ICE and the Pentagon and Chevron.”
A moment of clarity he writes about in the book came in 2019 when the company sent him to Kazakhstan to present Microsoft’s newest AI and cloud technologies, and how they could be used to optimize oil extraction, to a team from Chevron. That same week, a collective of tech workers within Amazon launched an open letter demanding the company take urgent and assertive action on climate change. Tan found himself staring at the juxtaposition of the public stand from Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, and the presentation he was preparing.
That December, Tan published an essay about his experience in Kazakhstan, detailing his industry and employer’s role in accelerating climate change. It made his inner conflict public: the industry’s branding as a force for good was becoming increasingly impossible to reconcile with the reality of who ran it.
“Even before I was sent out to Kazakhstan, I was already seeing these various collaborations take place and was already participating in organizing within the company,” Tan continued. “I think like so many others, we felt this sense of betrayal, to some extent. This kind of, you know, what we’re actually doing at the company is not the kind of vision of tech that was portrayed to us in college.”
A couple years and a lot of work later, Redwine and Tan were hired by a coalition of workers within Twitter who were alarmed and horrified by their platform’s role in the January 6th insurrection. Employees pushed then-CEO Jack Dorsey to remove President Trump’s account after he’d used it to disseminate instructions to the rioters in real time. Dorsey only agreed to do so, with reluctance, after hundreds of Twitter’s employees signed an open letter that bluntly stated, in part, “We helped fuel the deadly events of January 6th.” The momentum from the success of the letter surged employees towards unionization.
Months later, as Redwine and Tan’s work with employees there was beginning, Twitter was bought by Elon Musk. The subsequent slashing and gutting of the company and platform as we’d known it quashed all momentum.
Tan and Redwine say neither Twitter employees’ activism nor Musk’s takeover were hermetic acts. Momentum had been building among tech’s working class for a decade, as recognition built that they were laborers with considerable power. Retaliatory suppression from its top executives had been sharpening into standard, preventative procedure.
Tech is the most powerful and consequential industry in the world. It’s in the better interest of its billionaires for their workers to not consider their weight in its power. Tan and Redwine want them to remember, even when a battle like Twitter’s is lost, that the power of workers is substantial, the fight remains winnable, and that redistributing some of the power tech oligarchs have hoarded is the service to society many disillusioned tech workers once believed was the altruistic missions of their companies.
“Even before my time at Kickstarter, I was interested in startups because it felt like, you know, you’re part of making the world a better place,” Redwine reflected. “You’re part of this cradle of innovation, and innovation is synonymous with progress, which, I don’t feel that way today. The internal mantra that one of the [Kickstarter] founders came up with was ‘Fuck the monoculture’. We had t-shirts of it. I really bought into that ethos. And it took me a long time, and it took a lot of clashes with the boss at Kickstarter, for me to truly internalize class consciousness and realize I was on the other side and could be expendable at any moment.”
“We started writing this book at a time where we thought that the tech worker movement was really in this lull,” said Tan. “But I think since then, and especially since we submitted our draft, there’s been kind of a bunch of interesting collective actions in the tech sector. And, you know, I think people are kind of becoming interested again in the possibility of tech worker activism and sort of the potential that tech workers have in sort of holding this industry accountable.”
Tan and Redwine analyze the evolving tactics of tech organizing in the past decade, and reflect on strategies they themselves used and perpetuated that are no longer viable today.
“I do think that activism within the tech industry is still important, because workers clashing with the bosses, is showing to the public and to the world that it’s not that the world should be against tech at large, but rather it’s that there is a small group of people within the tech sector,” said Tan. “The bosses, the oligarchs, have particular interests that differ from the rest of us. The second reason it’s still important is, even if tech workers are not winning something for themselves in this first action, the very process of participating in collective actions in a movement where they’re fighting against their bosses is a very revealing moment for them.The tech industry is this very ideological place. When we started in the industry, it was very ideological for very different reasons. And it’s confusing to untangle the class relations in such an industry. I agree with everything Clarissa is saying on the limits of writing an open letter in this, you know, in the mid-2020s. But even that experience of writing an open letter and seeing how the boss responds is going to be revealing to a lot of tech workers in having this sense of, ‘us as workers have these sets of interests, and our bosses over there have these other interests.’ So, you know, in terms of raising class consciousness, I still think it is important.”
There is no full set of uniform instructions for unionizing a tech company. Organizing in tech looks both the same and different as organizing in other sectors of labor. The class-rooted issues are fundamentally the same. In tech, however — especially in the age of AI — tactics like strikes have to be strategized and structured more intentionally. The function of many tech jobs is to design a product that can eventually work without the people who built it that way. If unionization in tech culminates in a strike, it’s not going to look like walking off a job site.
“Something that we stress in the conclusion of the book is the process of workers discovering how to seize the means of production, how to actually wield their leverage as workers at a firm — this is something that every group of workers that has had a successful strike has gone through. And tech workers are no different in that regard. We need to test, and we need to see how the boss responds so we can learn how our strikes cannot be undermined in advance, and what strategies work. And that may look different across a tech company in different departments. Striking might look different. We’re really inviting tech workers into the challenge of figuring out how to strike effectively, which workers in other industries throughout history have had to do the same work: of thinking critically about their labor process, how their company functions, and how a strike could be effective. And we’re hoping tech workers can discover that.”