Unionizing High Tech: Opportunities and Obstacles

Collective action among tech workers is a welcome sign for the broader labor movement. The tech industry is currently setting the bar for what constitutes a “good job” in the public imagination. If tech workers can make further gains as workers (whether in wages and working conditions or by gaining some collective control over firm governance), adjacent industries and employers will mimic these employment norms as they compete for workers. This is what happened at the peak of the twentieth century labor movement, when leading unions such as the UAW set employment standards in their contracts that other employers had to match (Lichtenstein 2003).

The WERN report (Kochan et al. 2022) outlines some promising developments in the tech industry collective action. In addition to union organizing campaigns, these developments include protests by employees at Google and Amazon against their employers’ complacency with regard to climate change, the military-industrial complex, and diversity in the workplace. The WERN report also draws attention to new forms of alliance-building across the industry such as the Tech Workers Coalition, a worker organization that seeks to bridge the gap between tech's high-wage “core” employees and the “periphery” of low-wage contractors and gig workers that these firms try to keep at a distance. These developments represent important steps forward for tech workers.

This essay builds on the WERN report's findings in two ways. First, we more closely consider the causes and consequences of the recent spate of worker activism in the tech industry. We draw a distinction between organizing efforts focused on traditional “bread-and-butter” employment issues from organizing efforts focused on holding firms accountable to their “do-gooder” branding. These alternative forms of activism conjure different kinds of consciousness within workers and present different opportunities to the larger labor movement. In the second section, we consider how the tech industry's connection to Venture Capital (VC) presents unique cultural and organizational challenges for unionization.

Opportunities for Unionizing Tech

We begin by identifying two core ideals embodied in tech workers’ sense of professional identity that form the basis of recent employee organizing. By “professional identity” we refer to the narratives that employees use to think about their work and themselves in relation to work (Ibarra and Barbulescu 2010). While many of these ideas are shared with other kinds of professional workers, here we highlight two elements that are particularly accentuated in tech.

First, tech workers generally share a professional identity as serving the social good. The tech industry presents itself publicly and to its employees as uniquely interested in making the world a better place. This posturing traces back to the commercialization of the internet in the 1990s when industry leaders positioned tech as the bold leader of the “new economy” that would pull the US out of decades of industrial stagnation and create clean, knowledge-based jobs. Top tech firms over the last two decades triumphantly declare that they are “changing the world” and, unlike other corporate actors, are not “evil.” Facebook's mission statement, for instance, is “to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.” This purported social mission, largely echoed by politicians and the press, became a key part of the industry's appeal to the highly educated workers that have filled its ranks; the idea that tech workers are doing “good” in the world is central to employees’ sense of themselves as professionals.

Second, tech workers share an image of themselves as entrepreneurs and creatives in control of their career trajectories. This element of their professional identity is promoted by tech firms that claim to be uniquely interested in empowering workers. Tech firms routinely represent themselves as “flat” or anti-bureaucratic organizations with few layers of management, giving workers a sense that their voice and their opinions matter (Turco 2016). These firms put great effort toward convincing employees that they are part of a “family,” and use equity-heavy compensation packages to support the idea that employees are more like entrepreneurs than wage workers. This emphasis on individual empowerment helps to obfuscate the tensions inherent in the employment relationship; workers are drawn to the idea of having genuine autonomy to drive decisions and the direction of the firm.

While central to the work cultures of the tech industry today, these two elements of professional identity are regularly contradicted by the actions of tech firms—organizations that, despite claims to exceptionalism, are driven by the imperatives of capital accumulation. As such contradictions pile up, workers come to understand them as a betrayal of the ideals that they signed up for. This sense of betrayal animates much of the collective action outlined in the WERN report.

Contradictions in the two professional ideals outlined above have invited two different forms of organized grievance in response. First, the industry's claim to moral virtue—its penchant for positioning itself as an unalloyed vehicle for progress—is becoming harder and harder to sustain. Critiques of the industry have piled up in the popular press in the last five years, charging companies with facilitating the spread of misinformation, harming children, undermining privacy through the unauthorized selling of personal data, tolerating rampant sexism and racism within firms, supporting the military-industrial complex, and engaging in outright investor fraud. The onslaught of these accusations (after years of hagiographic coverage of the industry) has been dubbed the “tech-lash.”

Several of the collective actions identified by the WERN report should be understood as workers’ response to this specific contradiction. The Google protests of sexual harassment and the Tech Workers Coalition movements against climate change are attempts to force firm leaders to live up to the industry's PR of changing the world for the better.

Through this kind of organizing and action, tech workers are defending their professional identity as purveyors of the social good. Their critiques are focused on corporate misdeeds in the world generally; their position as workers contra capitalist employers is deemphasized. While these are important forms of social protest, they do not facilitate a sense of collective consciousness as workers. Nor do they orient participants towards solidarity with other US workers (whether within tech or beyond), limiting the effects of this form of organizing for improving workers’ positions in the labor market more broadly. Seen in this light, these forms of collective action may provide limited support for unionizing campaigns.

However, in recent months, the second axis of contradiction outlined above has become more salient, with promising results. The idea that tech firms are “flat” and that workers are more like self-directed entrepreneurs than wage workers, has become harder to sustain. Increased scrutiny of start-ups has revealed that their success in the stock market depends on the exploitation of a wide range of gig and contract workers that firms have tried to push outside of their circle of responsibility (Ravenelle 2019). As the industry faces an acute downturn and pursues mass layoffs, the hierarchical nature of these relationships and organizations becomes increasingly evident to workers, resulting in signs of incipient class consciousness.

Employers across the industry are using the recent downturn to reset labor relations in firms—to cut pay, ramp up expectations, and impose layoffs. This shift has been most obvious and extreme in Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter, which has involved the termination of more than half of the company and demands that surviving workers sign a loyalty oath consenting to new “hardcore” work norms involving extreme hours and top-down discipline.

Employees’ response to the threat to their professional autonomy is distinct from the actions they mount when the industry's “do-gooder” image is tarnished. Tech workers organizing to challenge workplace speed-up and threats of dismissal pick up a different set of tools: they turn to forms of collective action that more closely resemble those of labor unions.

The WERN report identifies some of these actions. Tech workers have successfully formed NLRB-recognized unions at the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter and online streaming company Glitch, among others. In these actions, workers are using the framework of collective bargaining to agitate for what might be considered more “bread-and-butter” workplace issues such as protections against arbitrary dismissal and improvements to wages and working conditions. In response to the Twitter layoffs, some workers identified unionization as their best response. “Unionize Tech” was a popular slogan on protest signs outside Twitter headquarters; intrepid activists projected the message on the building overnight.

Importantly, this kind of collective action conjures a different kind of consciousness than action focused on the industry's “do-gooder” image. Here, tech workers are presenting themselves first and foremost as workers in conflict with their employers. They work directly with labor unions that support a wide range of workers in different industries: the Kickstarter and Glitch campaigns were launched in coordination with the Communication Workers of America (CWA)—a union that represents some 700,000 workers from flight attendants to journalists.

Both kinds of actions are good and important, but the second—the one that positions tech workers as workers with a lot in common with workers in other industries—has the most potential for supporting the empowerment of US workers generally. This is the kind of action that WERN authors and readers should be the most enthusiastic about because it is fertile ground for worker solidarity across firms and across industries. This is where we can find some parallels to the way the UAW contracts of the 1950s pulled up wages and working conditions for many others. When privileged workers position themselves as structurally similar to lower wage workers, things can get combustible.

Ideally, these two forms of professional identity and resultant collective action are combined: so that tech workers present themselves as workers-contra-employers while also advancing concerns about sexism and climate change. In recent decades, the second set of preoccupations and demands has gained more traction than the first, but this split is not inevitable. As the WERN report attests, unions and their advocates have shown an increasing awareness of how the fights for economic equality and social justice are intertwined (Cha, Holgate, and Yon 2018).

Obstacles to Organizing in Tech: VC, Turnover, and Hype

While we share the optimism of the WERN report about the budding movement for labor rights in the tech industry, in this section we draw attention to the challenges to such movements. The industry's mode of financing creates a particular set of material and ideological obstacles to successful labor organizing. Specifically, the industry's dependence on VC creates sectoral volatility and high employee turnover rates that present significant challenges to worker activism.

Start-ups in the tech industry are funded by VC, a form of finance that has grown increasingly popular and powerful in the last two decades. VC firms raise money from institutional investors (e.g., pensions and endowments) and channel funds towards early-stage firms thought to have high growth potential. VC firms operate on a high-risk, high-reward investment logic: they expect the majority of their investments to fail and thus encourage their portfolio firms to pursue high-risk hypergrowth and moonshots able to return enough profit to make up for other losses. Venture capitalists compel tech firms to pursue go-big-or-go-home business models (Cooiman 2022; Shestakofsky 2020).

The result is an extremely turbulent industry. In contrast to the unionized, oligopolistic organizations of the mid-twentieth century, which used steady profits to pursue linear growth over extended time horizons (Reich 2008), VC-driven firms can offer no such stability. These organizations are constantly seeking new financing and “pivoting” production to meet investor expectations of exponential growth.

An important consequence of this volatile funding model is high employee turnover; tech firms have one of the highest turnover rates of any professional industry. Arbitrary dismissal accounts for a large portion of attrition, whether via formal layoffs (which come easily during product pivots and industry downturns) or through such extreme work expectations that workers “burnout” and quit from exhaustion.

When the threat of layoffs loom, any minor deviation from the company line can be the difference that brings down the axe—a strong incentive for employee conformity (Williams 2021). Thus, it is not surprising that the WERN report highlights how worker activism in tech results in almost certain firings. The situation is worse for contract workers, who must constantly prove their loyalty—their commitment to the organization and its mission—to get their contracts renewed. Those on immigrant visas face additional pressures to comply with company directives, as they are vulnerable to being sent “home” if they lose their jobs (Banerjee 2022). Further, a constantly shifting workforce makes the mechanics of workplace activism harder to sustain. Unionization efforts depend on a stable core of workers—often those with longer tenure at the firm—who expect to stay and are committed to taking steps to improve the organization in the long run (McAlevey 2020). When workers are constantly churned out, everyone learns to keep their eye on the door. In this context, the commitments necessary for structured, sustained unionization efforts are extremely difficult to build.

Importantly, the industry's financial logic has not only imprinted firms but also work culture. These organizational practices enjoy the consent of the industry's preferred workforce—young, highly educated, unmarried men. Many young workers who are drawn to these firms hope to grind their way towards what they describe as a “FIRE” exit (financial independence, retire early), a career trajectory that mirrors their employers’ dream of lucrative hypergrowth. In this frame, tech workers’ experience of exploitation (the long hours at work) is redefined as self-sacrifice for eventual rewards—and they have the human and social capital to fall back on if the wager doesn’t pay off (Neely, Sheehan, and Williams 2023).

This orientation to work, cultivated and encouraged by employers, is not easily matched to the worldview presented by organized labor. Fighting for seniority protection seems anachronistic in volatile and ever-changing organizations. Union contracts that institutionalize regular wage increases don’t make much sense when workers are focused on the value of their equity allotments next year. Although tech employees generally know that the chances of a lucrative “exit” are slim, the culture of tech firms makes this bargain sensible: they understand themselves as young men bravely taking career risks for the chance of a huge payoff down the road. Unionization and collective bargaining introduce an entirely different logic and culture, one that might smooth out the highs of hypergrowth, just as it would protect against the lows of burnout, layoffs, and firm failure.

For this reason, we are more likely to see successful shifts to this logic within the large, established, and profitable tech firms, than insurgent start-ups (Rho et al. 2023). The relative stability of the former affords more opportunities for the introduction of a union logic than does the entrepreneurial, “exit” orientation of the latter.

Over the past decade, the hype associated with tech start-ups has formed a strong material and cultural bulwark against unionization. This appears to be changing. As the WERN report notes, tech workers have the opportunity to take up an important position in the surge of worker organizing spanning the labor market today.