{"id":21592,"date":"2026-07-08T18:46:54","date_gmt":"2026-07-08T17:46:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/innovatenews.site\/index.php\/2026\/07\/08\/a-brewing-battle-more-it-workers-want-unions-the-industry-doesnt\/"},"modified":"2026-07-08T18:47:02","modified_gmt":"2026-07-08T17:47:02","slug":"a-brewing-battle-more-it-workers-want-unions-the-industry-doesnt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/innovatenews.site\/index.php\/2026\/07\/08\/a-brewing-battle-more-it-workers-want-unions-the-industry-doesnt\/","title":{"rendered":"A brewing battle: More IT workers want unions. The industry doesn\u2019t."},"content":{"rendered":"
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The topic A brewing battle: More IT workers want unions. The industry doesn\u2019t.<\/strong> is currently the subject of lively discussion \u2014 readers and analysts are keeping a close eye on developments.<\/p>\n

This is taking place in a dynamic environment: companies\u2019 decisions and competitors\u2019 reactions can quickly change the picture.<\/p>\n

Until recently, many tech professionals viewed themselves as a special and respected worker class: highly educated, hard-working, well paid, and in demand.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey considered themselves above unions,\u201d says Zak Thompson, senior software engineer at Kickstarter and union steward at Kickstarter United.<\/p>\n

Big Tech issued aspirational mission statements that motivated workers, workplaces were seen as meritocracies, and employees were encouraged to speak out if they were unhappy. If workers didn\u2019t like where they worked, they just moved on: other employers would be falling over themselves to hire them.<\/p>\n

Now, fed up with mass layoffs, disillusioned with Big Tech\u2019s direction, and stunned by bold management proclamations that AI will displace huge numbers of people in many tech jobs \u2014 starting with programmers \u2014 interest in unions has risen sharply among tech professionals. Workers in some organizations, including Kickstarter, have already taken the plunge.<\/p>\n

\u201cStarting in 2022, the industry as a whole started seeing very large layoffs across the board [and] that has dramatically shifted the balance of power. I think most people in the industry have experienced that one way or another,\u201d says Google software engineer Alan McAvinney.<\/p>\n

But not everyone is convinced that the layoffs have changed the power dynamic. \u201cI wouldn\u2019t say the balance has definitively shifted\u2026 some things point to workers losing ground and others point to improvement,\u201d says Liya Palagashvili, senior research fellow and director of the Labor Policy Project at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.<\/p>\n

Liya Palagashvili of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University<\/p>\n

What matters, she says, is not the size of the layoffs but worker options: how easily laid off workers can find alternative work in their field.<\/p>\n

For McAvinney, the decision to support a union was about a culture change at his employer.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn 2019, Google fired four people (the \u2018Thanksgiving Four\u2019) after they organized and spoke out internally against the company\u2019s work with the anti-union firm IRI and US Customs and Border Protection. That was a big turning point for me,\u201d he says. \u201cHistorically, we had a pretty robust culture that actually encouraged us to speak up internally.\u201d<\/p>\n

Google said the employees were fired for violating data security policies, but many workers believed the move was retaliatory. It became a galvanizing event that contributed to the launch of the Alphabet Workers Union (AWU) in 2021, says McAvinney, organizing chair, Alphabet Workers Union-CWA. (Alphabet is the parent company of Google.)<\/p>\n

So far, tech worker interest in unions hasn\u2019t translated into higher membership numbers nationally. according to the data the US Census Bureau\u2019s Current Population Survey (CPS), union membership in tech occupations was about 3.5% in 2025, says Palagashvili. \u201cWhile there have been some high-profile organizing efforts, they do not yet show up as a broad national increase in tech-sector unionization.\u201d<\/p>\n

Overall, only 10% of American workers belonged to a union in 2025, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported \u2014 near an all-time low \u2014 but interest in labor unions is rising. A 2025 Gallup survey found that 68% of Americans approved of unions, up from 48% in 2009. Interest is particularly strong among younger workers, the Economic Policy Institute reports, and in a 2024 online survey of 1,900 tech professionals on the career site Blind, 67% of respondents said they\u2019d be \u201cvery likely\u201d or \u201csomewhat likely\u201d to join a union if their company had one.<\/p>\n

Nonetheless, for most tech professionals, those positive perceptions have not so far translated into widespread union membership.<\/p>\n

In the wake of mass layoffs that began in 2022, the primary driver toward tech worker unionization may well be job security.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think a greater concern is that their work and skills have been devalued at the same time their jobs become less secure and their wages and benefits have declined,\u201d says Kate Bronfenbrenner, director of labor education research and senior lecturer emeritus at Cornell University\u2019s School of Industrial and Labor Relations.<\/p>\n

Kate Bronfenbrenner from the School of Industrial and Labor Relations, Cornell University<\/p>\n

The fear that AI will displace IT workers en masse is palpable, says Google\u2019s McAvinney. Whether the mass layoffs to date were actually driven by AI or if AI was used as a pretext, \u201cLarge numbers of people have that concern, and that is absolutely part of the interest in collective action \u2014 getting organized, joining a union, or forming a union,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

The second motivator is ideological disillusionment. \u201cWorkers recruited with promises that they would be changing the world discovered that they were really building surveillance systems or military technologies,\u201d Bronfenbrenner says.<\/p>\n

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The insidious use of AI surveillance is another concern, says Bronfenbrenner. for example, Meta\u2019s announcement that it would use AI to track US-based workers\u2019 computer activities, including clicks, keystrokes, mouse movements, and screen snapshots to train AI agents had a dystopian feel to it. Were these workers training AI to take over their jobs, just as US workers were asked to train their lower-cost foreign replacements during the offshoring craze in the mid-2000s? (Meta later paused the tracking program after employees twice demonstrated the inadequacy of privacy protections for the collected data.)<\/p>\n

But Bronfenbrenner argues that AI\u2019s bigger threat may be its use as a surveillance tool to prevent organizing. \u201cMy research on surveillance in organizing campaigns found that it tripled from 11% in the early 2000s to one third in 2021,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe deeper pattern is the same one inherent in Taylorism \u2014 management trying to know everything that\u2019s under the worker\u2019s cap, to monitor every step so workers have no control and no secrets,\u201d Bronfenbrenner says. \u201cNow they have even more technologies to do it, and they can potentially replace you entirely with AI.\u201d<\/p>\n

Simone Robutti, an organizer with Tech Workers Coalition Global, calls the current wave of tech layoffs \u201ca prequel to whatever AI-driven layoffs are coming.\u201d It\u2019s part of the trend of \u201clowering the cost of knowledge workers, of cognitive workers, of office workers in general \u2014 because that\u2019s the bet on AI,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

Whether employers can in fact replace workers with AI (or will be able to soon) is an open question. \u201cIf Amazon lays off a hundred workers, and ninety of them find comparable jobs within a few months, that mitigates the concern,\u201d says Palagashvili from George Mason University. \u201cIf most of them have to sell their houses and move across the country, or end up underemployed \u2014 not just unemployed, but working in warehouses instead of at a competitor \u2014 that\u2019s a different picture.\u201d<\/p>\n

So far that hasn\u2019t been a big issue for former Google employees, says McAvinney. \u201cIt used to be that if you left Google, you could get a job anywhere in tech instantly. That\u2019s no longer the case, but most people I talk to are still finding work in the industry,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

But for those newly entering the workforce, it\u2019s much harder to find a job. according to the data the Stanford HAI 2026 AI Index Report, released in April, \u201cemployment for software developers ages 22 to 25 has fallen nearly 20% from 2024.\u201d<\/p>\n

While organizing can be an uphill battle and workers often face aggressive pushback from their employers, there have been a few notable successes.<\/p>\n

In the UK, workers can join a union as individual members before their employer formally recognizes that union for collective bargaining purposes. That\u2019s how 300 workers in Google DeepMind\u2019s London office initially joined the Communication Workers Union. In April, 98% of the 300 CWU members voted in favor of pursuing union recognition, formally requesting that management recognize the CWU and Unite the Union as representatives for approximately 1,000 staff. (Google DeepMind disputed characterizing the action as a vote to unionize).<\/p>\n

And in May, some 2,100 tech workers at the University of California joined the University Professional and Technical Employees union, which is affiliated with Communications Workers of America (UPTE-CWA), with 96% of the workers voting yes.<\/p>\n

\u201cA lot of tech workers right now are extremely concerned about job security and about their work being automated,\u201d says Max Belasco, a business systems analyst at the UCLA School of Law and co-chair of the UCLA chapter of UPTE-CWA, Local 9119.<\/p>\n

The CWA described the organizing initiative as \u201cthe largest tech industry organizing campaign in US history.\u201d But it wasn\u2019t the first.<\/p>\n

\u201cBetween 2022 and 2024, CWA organized nearly 400 different digital media companies,\u201d Bronfenbrenner says, including the game developer Activision and the New York Times.<\/p>\n

Kickstarter\u2019s 85 employees voted in 2020 to form Kickstarter United \u2014 the vote was 55% in favor \u2014 and most recently the union negotiated a contract that includes a four-day workweek, AI protections, and a minimum pay floor for 59 employees, including tech workers.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat we ended up winning was yearly benchmarking of all employee salaries to the 60th percentile, along with yearly cost of living adjustments,\u201d says Thompson.<\/p>\n

But the way forward has been rocky. Shortly after the union was ratified, Kickstarter announced layoffs. The union, which is affiliated with the Office and Professional Employees International Union (OPEIU), wasn\u2019t able to reverse that decision but did negotiate better severance terms, including four months of severance pay (versus 2 to 3 weeks for every year worked) and six months of health benefits.<\/p>\n

When contract negotiations faltered in October 2025, the union went on strike for 42 days. By December, a new contract was ratified. Shortly thereafter, the company announced another round of layoffs that included four union leaders, one of whom had helped to negotiate the new contract. The union is currently fighting those dismissals and will be arguing its case in third-party arbitration.<\/p>\n

The National Labor Relations Act of 1935 codified American workers\u2019 rights to unionize and take collective action, and it established the National Labor Relations Board to protect those rights. Unfortunately for Kickstarter, NLRA enforcement under the Trump administration isn\u2019t what it once was.<\/p>\n

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\u201cCases brought up for violations of the NLRA can go for months or years without ever seeing a hearing or having any sort of judgment. That gives companies more power to flagrantly ignore it,\u201d Thompson says.<\/p>\n

Tech firms have other weapons to dissuade employees from unionizing. Researchers from Carnegie Mellon University and Princeton University in 2025 interviewed 44 US-based tech worker-organizers, who cited additional pressure tactics including threats to withdraw venture capital funding \u2014 essentially killing venture-backed firms if employees vote to unionize \u2014 and threats of being fired that put tech workers with H-1B visas in an impossible position.<\/p>\n

Kickstarter United is a majority union \u2014 one that has won NLRB certification. While that\u2019s possible in smaller organizations, success in larger tech firms has been much more limited.<\/p>\n

Alphabet is a prime example: the Alphabet Workers Union-CWA is a \u201cpre-majority\u201d union that lacks NLRB certification and has no formally recognized bargaining unit. Formed in 2021 with fewer than 400 members, today it represents 1,400 members, still a small fraction of Alphabet\u2019s US-based workforce, estimated at over 100,000.<\/p>\n

The challenge, says McAvinney, lies in trying to organize a distributed workforce of in-office, remote, and contract workers. \u201cLarge tech companies don\u2019t split easily into discrete segments \u2014 there\u2019s no strong geographic component to teams, and a single team is often spread across many locations,\u201d which makes getting majority support unrealistic, he says.<\/p>\n

But that doesn\u2019t mean the union has had no impact. \u201cIn January, we launched our Googlers for Job Security campaign. Today we\u2019re organizing around four demands: a guaranteed minimum severance package for everyone who\u2019s laid off, voluntary buyouts before any mandatory layoffs, an end to GRAD quotas (GRAD being Google\u2019s performance review system) so ratings reflect actual performance and aren\u2019t given or changed to force a particular distribution, and the option to take severance as leave, giving workers, especially those on visas, more time on payroll,\u201d McAvinney says.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn response, Google did start offering voluntary exit packages,\u201d he says. The union was also able to negotiate one contract, for Google Help workers. However, those workers aren\u2019t actually Google employees: they\u2019re contractors who report to Google management but work for Accenture.<\/p>\n

Do unions get what they bargain for? Conservative business and labor economists say union contracts typically have rigid pay structures that restrict merit-based pay in favor of seniority-based wage increases, and that unions, as certified by the NLRB, create labor monopolies that limit worker choice and push up wages to levels detrimental to both workers and business.<\/p>\n

The collective bargaining model is not well suited to the highly dynamic and innovation-driven tech sector, Palagashvili argues. \u201cFirms often need to reorganize teams, redesign products, adjust roles, and redeploy talent quickly,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

Collective bargaining agreements make those adjustments much more difficult by imposing uniform terms for an entire bargaining unit, regardless of individual preferences and circumstances. The contracts, she says, \u201care more about higher pay and less about flexibility.\u201d<\/p>\n

But Thompson says that hasn\u2019t been his experience. \u201cThe thing with a union is you get to write the contract,\u201d he says. \u201cAt Kickstarter we care about recognizing individual contributions, merit, and having a clear career progression.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kickstarter United pushed the company to clearly define what it takes to get a promotion, advocated for no \u201cat will\u201d employment, where employees can be fired any time without a stated reason; won standards for minimum pay, raises, promotions, and time off; secured AI protections; and codified a four-day work week.<\/p>\n

Yes, some tech professionals voiced concerns about unions, such as that they stifle innovation and limit compensation for top performers, Thompson says, but \u201ca lot of those people came around. They said \u2018I was wrong. I feel way more protected, more secure, and I see the benefits.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Bronfenbrenner says it\u2019s a mistake to think that tech workers are inherently different from other workers, adding that the two industries with the highest union density are entertainment and professional sports. \u201cThese are professionals with unique talents and capabilities, and they\u2019ve organized successfully under the exclusive representation system.\u201d<\/p>\n

If unions eventually prevail in tech, it will happen in the face of intense pressure from employers not to organize.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Alphabet Workers Union is a case study of the limits of the first wave of tech labor organizing,\u201d says Robutti from the Tech Workers Coalition. \u201cThey hit a threshold beyond which they couldn\u2019t fight the union busting anymore, and they became entrenched at that size.\u201d<\/p>\n

No one should expect large-scale unionization to occur overnight, Bronfenbrenner says. \u201cThe auto and steel industries weren\u2019t organized in months. It took decades. Organizing global tech companies will take the same.\u201d<\/p>\n

While McAvinney acknowledges that a traditional majority union may be difficult to achieve any time soon in a company as large as Alphabet, he\u2019s still bullish on his pre-majority union\u2019s ability to make a difference. \u201cUltimately, regardless of which type of union you are, you can only win as much as you have leverage to win. Your leverage is inherently limited, but that doesn\u2019t mean you can\u2019t win anything,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

Attitudes about unions appear to be changing rapidly. \u201cInterest in unions is high, and I expect that will continue,\u201d McAvinney says. \u201cNow is an excellent time for people to start getting organized. I have seen lots of evidence of that.\u201d<\/p>\n

Thompson agrees. \u201cWe are seeing an uptick of people in tech reaching out, trying to get help organizing. When people have their job conditions continue to deteriorate, they are going to start organizing,\u201d he says. \u201cWe\u2019re definitely seeing a shift from \u2018it\u2019d be nice if we had a union\u2019 to \u2018okay, how can I actually do this now?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Come back next week for Part 2: How to unionize your tech workplace<\/p>\n