The Biggest Tech Union in the Country Isn't in Silicon Valley
A while back I wrote about San Francisco’s cab drivers—the people the tech industry came for first, back when it decided the rules didn’t apply to it. That piece ended on a question I couldn’t answer: when the disruption comes for the next group of workers, will anyone actually fight back?
Last month I got part of an answer. More than 2,100 IT and technical workers across the University of California voted to join UPTE-CWA 9119, pushing the union’s tech unit to 8,400 people and making it the largest tech worker union in the country. These are the workers who keep UC’s research, hospitals, cybersecurity, and public data systems running. Infrastructure that millions of Californians touch without ever thinking about it.
I called Max Belasco, a business systems analyst at UCLA who helped lead the organizing drive. For him, it’s more than just a labor fight: It’s an argument over who and what technology is supposed to be for.
“We’re technologists first and foremost because we believe technology can help people,” he told me. “We think that it can make things better.”
That’s easily lost when people hear “tech workers” and “union” in the same breath. These aren’t people who hate the tools, they are the people who build them. What they object to is being handed AI from above by executives and consultants who’ve never touched the systems they’re reorganizing.
“Nobody that I’ve talked to is against new training in new technology,” Belasco said. “But what’s concerning is that there isn’t really clarity on what is the end goal. What’s the five-year to 10-year plan on how this technology is going to be implemented?”
For Max, it’s a question of who gets to ask those questions, and sit at the table where they’re being answered—not just at UC, but across the modern workforce.
“AI is being imposed unilaterally and considered inevitable by a very small group of people from the private sector in Silicon Valley. One of the concerns we have is that model of unilateral control and imposition being applied in the public sector.”
A union provides the legal, structural framework to change who’s in the room when those calls get made. The workers who just organized are building power over how these tools get deployed, and they’re the ones who actually know what the tools do.
“The people who are implementing these tech resources know how they impact frontline services,” Belasco said. “We know how they help support frontline staff, and we know the pros and cons in the way they are implemented, the limitations of these tools, as well as their benefits.”
That knowledge almost never counts for anything in tech. You can push back internally or you can quit, and neither one touches the decision itself. Bargaining over the systems is something most tech workers in the private sector simply can’t do. UC workers can now, at some of the most important medical and research facilities in the country.
“We’re a university,” Belasco said. “We’re supposed to be about public excellence. We’re about trying to figure out new ways to do stuff. UCLA was one of the birthplaces of the internet. I seriously doubt that a Deloitte consultant hired by the administration would have approved of a project like the internet.”
They want structural changes at their workplace, for sure, but Max and his coworkers have a vision for tech that could reshape the industry.
“One thing that everyone seems very excited about is the idea of why can’t we demonstrate a work model that’s different than the model that has dominated private sector tech and has brought us to this situation,” he said.
And for his private-sector colleagues:
“Now is the time to do this,” he said. “We will never have more leverage than what we have now to really assert authority and control.”
What it takes, he says, is people willing to stand together and reclaim something he describes as “a genuine curiosity and love for tinkering with things, making things work, and finding new, exciting ways we can implement this stuff to just have better lives.”
The cab drivers I wrote about organized too late, after the medallions were worthless and the industry was already gutted. The UC workers are moving while they still have leverage. Whether it amounts to anything depends on what the union can win at their jobsites, and on whether anyone else follows. But for once the people who understand the systems are the ones sitting at the table, asking the question the rest of the industry keeps dodging: not what AI can replace, but who gets to decide what it’s for.
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