The tech industry has always been seen as a world of its own, with generous salaries, enviable perks, and a culture that values individualism above all else.
But something is shifting in that landscape, and the change runs deeper than it might seem at first glance.
Lucas, a pseudonym for a software engineer with a decade of experience in the San Francisco Bay Area, represents a profile that is becoming less and less rare out there. He has worked at startups, spent time at one of the sector’s major companies, and now works at a roughly 500-person company that builds software for biologists. A pretty standard resume for Silicon Valley, to be fair.
But his current goal is very different from what drives most of his peers. Lucas does not want to found the next unicorn or create a revolutionary product. What he wants is to form a union at the company where he works and help other tech professionals who share the same idea.
Sounds contradictory, right? A successful professional with experience at big companies and startups choosing labor organizing over chasing the capitalist dream that so defines the sector’s mythology. But that paradox starts making perfect sense when you understand what Lucas is after. For him, organizing workers is a way to build collective power, form community, have more say over their own working conditions, and create a counterweight to the influence of billionaire CEOs and venture capitalists.
In his own words, the desire is for the tech industry to serve the community around it. And according to Lucas, a lot of people think exactly the same way.
This sentiment is emerging at a very specific moment in the tech market over the past few years:
- Mass layoffs that swept through even the most established giants in the sector 🏢
- The accelerated arrival of artificial intelligence in workflows and company products
- A growing sense of precarity and powerlessness among professionals
- Increasingly close ties between certain tech companies and the military sector
And that is exactly where AI enters as a central piece of this story. Because when the tools you helped build start threatening your own job, the question what do I do now? takes on a completely different weight. 🤔
Why tech workers are unionizing now
California is one of the most union-friendly states in the entire United States, and the San Francisco area is one of the most unionized metro regions in the state. Despite that, labor organizers have never managed to make much headway inside the tech industry. Very few professionals in the sector are represented by unions or even got involved in organizing efforts until very recently.
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For decades, the dominant logic in Silicon Valley was simple: if you are good at what you do, you do not need collective protection. The market will take care of you. And for a long time, that logic worked reasonably well for a significant chunk of professionals in the field. Tech jobs tended to pay really well, offer robust benefits, and include stock compensation, which opened the door to even bigger paydays down the road. That package addressed many of the very issues that typically drive workers to organize.
But activists like Lucas believe the tide is turning. Public support for unions in the United States is at its highest level in about 60 years, according to Gallup surveys. And younger workers, who make up a large share of the tech workforce, tend to be especially favorable toward the union cause.
Joshua Carroll, one of the leaders of the Tech Workers Coalition chapter in the Bay Area and a product manager at Google Cloud, sums up the shift in mood well. According to him, people are now seeking out the group, not the other way around. People are really happy when they find out they are not alone, Carroll said. That is an important detail, because it shows the movement is born out of spontaneous demand, not some external campaign trying to convince reluctant workers.
An old story that never really took off
Unionization efforts in tech are not entirely new. They go back at least to the mid-1970s, when IBM employees started organizing. That activity has come and gone over the years, typically gaining momentum during times of crisis or economic uncertainty, like the dot-com bubble burst or the Great Recession, according to Ron Hira, a political science professor at Howard University who specializes in labor issues and policy.
The problem is that, outside the digital publishing sector, which saw a wave of unions form, very few of these initiatives managed to create unions capable of collectively bargaining on behalf of workers. The IBM case is telling. The organization existed for decades representing employees and pressuring management, but it never sought or formed a bargaining unit recognized by the company or the National Labor Relations Board. It ultimately shut down in 2016, following staff cuts at the company.
Generally speaking, forming a recognized union in the United States is hard. Companies frequently fight organizing efforts and retaliate against those who lead them. And even without that opposition, it can take years to build enough support to win a majority vote within a specific group of workers.
Since union membership has been declining in the country since its peak in the mid-twentieth century, fewer people grew up in union households or know someone who is part of a union. According to Hira, labor representatives rarely appear on television. And in his words, if you are not exposed to it, you do not even think that way.
Why tech has been so hard to organize
The tech industry has always been a tough nut to crack for the labor movement. Even within an American corporate culture that is already not particularly union-friendly, the tech sector has fought especially hard against organizing efforts.
But there are other reasons for the scarcity of unions, and they have to do with cultural and class dynamics. The sector has always had a strong libertarian streak, and many professionals see themselves as individuals who rise or fall on their own merit, not as part of a collective. On top of that, engineers and programmers tend to identify more as managers or independent professionals than as workers in the traditional sense, according to Hira.
Layered on top of all that, workers are divided among themselves in several ways. Tech jobs come in different flavors, spread across countless companies and regions. And even within a single company, there is often a split between directly hired employees and outsourced contractors.
All of this makes these professionals difficult to organize. The result shows up in the numbers. Across all occupations, about 10% of American workers belong to unions. But last year, only 3.7% of computer and mathematical professionals were unionized, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Marcus Courtney, who helped lead a union effort at Microsoft in the late 1990s and early 2000s, sums up the landscape bluntly: tech is probably the only industry in United States history to become a pillar of the national economy while remaining essentially union-free.
Artificial intelligence as a catalyst for the movement
Artificial intelligence occupies a very specific place in this conversation, and understanding that place is key to grasping why the labor movement in tech has taken on a different urgency recently. This is not just about fear of automation, a topic that has existed for decades in other sectors. What is happening now is something more complex: the very professionals who developed, trained, and refined these tools are watching their work be transformed by them. It is an irony that hits hard.
The rapid adoption of the technology has generated widespread concern about how it is affecting jobs and the fear that it could lead to mass unemployment. At the same time, curiously, the AI industry itself increasingly depends on unionized workers to build the data centers that run and train its models, as Courtney points out. And industry leaders like Sam Altman of OpenAI and Dario Amodei of Anthropic have already spoken publicly about the need to address the potential for AI-driven job losses.
There is also an ethical dimension that cannot be ignored. Many tech workers are increasingly uncomfortable with the role they play in developing AI systems without having any voice in decisions about how those systems are used, who they affect, and what safeguards exist.
What has already changed at major tech companies
Despite all the barriers, things have started moving over the past ten years. Perhaps the most surprising development is that unions now exist at two of the largest tech companies in the world.
When Microsoft was trying to acquire Activision Blizzard in 2022, the company committed to maintaining a neutral stance toward an organizing effort that was emerging within the game publisher and distributor. Since then, thousands of workers across Microsoft’s gaming divisions have organized into multiple unions.
Alphabet employees, meanwhile, launched a union in 2021. Unlike what happened at Microsoft, this group did not seek formal recognition from the company or the National Labor Relations Board. Still, the Alphabet Workers Union brought together members from across the country and managed to pressure management on behalf of workers, according to Emma Jackson, who works at Google, an Alphabet company, and handles communications for the group.
Jackson did not reveal how many workers are part of the union, but said it includes both full-time employees and contractors. One concrete example of impact: as Google cut staff over the past two years, the company prioritized voluntary exit packages, where employees choose to leave in exchange for severance, rather than direct layoffs. According to Jackson, that choice came in response to pressure from the union. Even without being at the formal bargaining table, she says the group’s pressure and demands helped secure that option.
Jackson, who has worked at Google for 22 years, says she once believed the company was different from the rest. She bought into the famous early philosophy of not being evil, which the company eventually moved away from over time. Her involvement with the union effort was born precisely from the feeling that the company had drifted from those values. She was also motivated by realizing that even after employees tried to hold the company to those principles, the wins rarely lasted.
One striking example was the massive employee walkout in 2018, protesting how the company handled sexual harassment complaints. After the movement, Google ended the policy requiring arbitration to deal with those cases. But two of the protest’s leaders alleged the company retaliated against them, a claim the company denies. At the time, employees did not have a union to back them up, and Jackson says she and her colleagues learned from that experience. For her, that is exactly why a union is necessary, so that solidarity exists among people and there is a structure capable of providing mutual support.
What changes when tech workers organize collectively
When people talk about unions inside the tech industry, it is easy to fall into the trap of imagining the movement as just a copy of traditional unionism applied to a different sector. But what is emerging has its own characteristics. The tech workers who are organizing are not, for the most part, fighting only for raises or better physical working conditions. They are seeking transparency in layoff criteria, protection against decisions that affect their careers, a seat at the table in discussions about internal AI use, and guarantees that they will not be forced to work on projects they consider unethical.
In the Bay Area, there are reports of organizing beyond what is happening at Google and at Lucas’s company. He, who is also active in the Tech Workers Coalition, says he is aware of other early-stage efforts at different companies. Carroll says some members of the group are working to organize professionals inside major San Francisco tech companies. According to Lucas, these efforts tend to be slow and careful, as organizers talk to colleagues, find out what bothers them, and gradually build a support structure.
This broader agenda transforms labor activism in tech into something that goes well beyond what the word unionism typically brings to mind. When an engineer has a collective voice in how a content moderation system is developed, or how a hiring algorithm is calibrated, the impact goes far beyond their own job. It touches on issues of justice, privacy, and equity that affect millions of users.
The future of work in tech runs through collective organizing
Nobody knows exactly how the tech market will reshape itself over the next five or ten years. The speed at which artificial intelligence is evolving makes any prediction risky, and the most respected experts in the field deeply disagree about which roles will be transformed, which will be eliminated, and what new categories of work will emerge. What does seem reasonably clear, though, is that workers who act collectively will have more ability to influence that process than those who navigate it alone.
Despite knowing the frustrating track record of past efforts and having personally participated in them, Courtney believes this is a favorable moment to organize the sector, precisely because of artificial intelligence. For him, the combination of fear of unemployment, AI’s dependence on unionized labor, and the willingness of some leaders to discuss the topic creates a real window of opportunity. It sparks workers’ appetite for organizing and, at the same time, may make companies more receptive. In his words, there is an opportunity there.
The unions and forms of labor organizing being built inside the tech industry are still young and face significant resistance. Companies in the sector are known for their creativity in discouraging unionization, whether through corporate cultures that make the idea socially awkward or through more direct strategies of pressuring emerging leaders within teams. But the movement has shown resilience, and each round of mass layoffs seems to function as an involuntary recruiter for the cause.
Lucas probably represents thousands of people who are, right now, having similar conversations in private channels, closed groups, and discreet meetups inside companies that would rather this conversation never happened. The history of labor movements in other sectors shows that once workers reach the point of realizing collective action is necessary, that point rarely goes backward. What changes is the form, the speed, and the concrete results that organizing manages to achieve. And in the case of the tech industry, the results of this organizing go beyond the workers themselves. They have the potential to shape how technology, and especially artificial intelligence, will impact the rest of society in the decades ahead. 🚀
