A political and economic battle against today’s robber barons — the billionaire and trillionaire class of tech bosses — is unfolding on many fronts as tech workers agitate against these oligarchs’ complicity with the U.S. military, the cops, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and the Israeli occupation of Palestine.
In their new book, Against Tech Oligarchy: Workers Resistance in the World’s Most Powerful Industry, JS Tan and Clarissa Redwine recount the emergence of the tech workers’ movement over the last two decades, from the political campaigns they have launched to the heroic strikes they have staged against companies like Kickstarter and The New York Times.
No armchair analysts, Tan and Redwine are tech worker leaders who have been at the heart of many of these fights. In this interview, they discuss the rise of the movement, the workers’ turn to unionization, and the oligarchs’ adoption of authoritarianism and austerity to crush it. And they draw lessons from this struggle not only for tech workers, but for the entire labor movement.
The interview that follows has been lightly edited for clarity and length.
Ashley Smith: The tech workers’ movement was first spurred into action by the radicalization and social movements triggered by the Great Recession. Workers launched campaigns against their companies’ contracts with, for instance, the U.S. military and ICE. What strategies and tactics did workers use?
JS Tan: After the Great Recession, corporate America thought the tech sector was going to rejuvenate the U.S. economy. The tech bosses were aligned with the Democratic Party and embraced things like identity politics and put forth a progressive, democratic vision of the future.
But the industry’s workers realized that the tech sector was not living up to its mission statements and public pronouncements. They were making software for the U.S. military, ICE, and police. And their internal culture was rife with sexism and racism.
So, tech workers launched campaigns to expose their bosses’ hypocrisy. A good example of this is the Google workers’ campaign against the company’s Project Maven, which used AI to analyze military drone footage.
Workers mobilized their radical co-workers and went public with an open letter [to Google CEO Sundar Pichai] in The New York Times. That exposure forced the company to concede to their demand not to renew its Project Maven contract. Simplifying greatly, the tech movement as a whole adopted this strategy of mobilization behind open letters.
This provoked opposition from the tech oligarchy. It abandoned its California liberalism, which included opposition to Donald Trump in his first term, and instead largely backed him in his second term. What caused this political reorientation? How did it change their companies and treatment of workers?
Tan: In our book, we show how the battle in the tech industry led both workers and bosses to acquire class consciousness. It was a process of radicalization on both sides. Initially, the bosses expressed sympathy with the upsurge of tech worker activism, conceded to their workers’ demands, and implemented DEI [diversity, equity, and inclusion] initiatives.
But they got fed up with being told how to run their businesses and started retaliating against their workers for writing open letters, participating in walkouts, and starting union drives. Then, after the pandemic, the Federal Reserve Bank ended its zero-interest rate policy to combat the sharp rise in inflation.
Suddenly, the tech companies lost access to cheap credit and lost billions of dollars in market valuation. To restore their profit margins, they enacted mass layoffs (being asset-light businesses, employee salaries were their largest costs), return-to-work orders, and speed-ups of the remaining workforce.
Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter is a paradigmatic example. He fired 80 percent of the workforce. He combined that with an ideological assault on the company, targeting teams that oversaw human rights, AI ethics, and content moderation — the teams he believed housed the most progressive, pro-union workers. Seeing this, other tech bosses followed suit, imposing a new normal of authoritarianism, austerity, and anti-wokeness.
In the face of the tech oligarchs’ new authoritarianism, the workers abandoned their old strategy of using open letters and instead started unionizing to protect their jobs and rights. They pursued what you call the union movement’s “Recognition Playbook.” What is that and what did it accomplish?
Clarissa Redwine: The Recognition Playbook is the dominant method for organizing unions with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). We made lists of everyone that works at a company, identified organic leaders, trained them to set up one-on-one conversations with co-workers, and systematically built toward a supermajority for a union.
After that, we filed for union elections with the NLRB — in some cases, won them — and then established a legally recognized union. Because this strategy required majority support, we switched from organizing against political issues like military contracts or systemic sexism to bread-and-butter economic demands.
These issues, we believed, would build solidarity and unite the broadest section of the workforce behind a campaign for union recognition under the NLRB. Following the Recognition Playbook, tech workers organized several unions at Kickstarter and other companies.
This Recognition Playbook ran into real problems and workers faced diminishing returns. How did the bosses undermine new unions and how did they block the formation of others?
Redwine: The bosses used their own union busting playbook against tech workers. They fired the most visible organizers at Kickstarter, Google, and Amazon. In some cases, they went further. For example, Google fired not just core organizers of a Palestine action, but everyone involved, including bystanders that were just watching.
Tech bosses hired union-busting consultants. They claimed no venture capitalist would ever invest in a union company, putting their viability in jeopardy. When that didn’t work to intimidate organizers, they piled extra work on everyone.
After the end of the zero-interest rate policy, they generalized this crackdown to impose austerity measures, speed-ups, and layoffs on the entire tech workforce. One trick they used to get rid of people was return-to-office orders. At Grindr, for example, management demanded that workers return to the office furthest from them, basically forcing them to quit.
You analyze one of the biggest moments militancy: the tech workers’ strike at The New York Times.How did the company’s bosses neutralize the effectiveness of the strike? Why didn’t the rest of the unionized workforce join the strike?
Redwine: The bosses exploited the nature of tech work to neutralize the strike. A lot of tech workers are used to speed-ups to finish projects by a specific deadline. So, there’s ebbs and flows in the intensity of work and overall number of hours.
The New York Times bosses took advantage of that norm leading up to the strike that was set to take place on the eve of the 2024 presidential election. So, months before that, management asked their workers to prepare their platforms to withstand the surge of election coverage.
In retrospect, it should have been obvious that they were undermining the impact of the strike by setting up the platform to function without workers. But organizers didn’t see that at the time.
When they finally did walk out, the strike lasted about a week. Their picket line grew in size with more and more workers joining the picket line excited to be a part of a militant action. The solidarity was electric.
But the strike did not shut down the platform. It largely stayed up, and management didn’t offer anything new at the bargaining table. As a result, the strike was essentially a failure.
If the rest of the workforce (e.g., the newsroom) had struck, it would have made a huge difference. But they were legally barred by the no-strike pledge in their contracts. This is the norm for most unions between negotiating periods.
Moreover, existing labor law bars unions from engaging in solidarity strikes. It fundamentally constrains the power of our unions. To overcome these legal barriers, workers have to align their contracts, get rid of no-strike clauses, defy labor law, and exercise our power. Remember, most of the big breakthroughs in the union movement came from illegal strikes.
How has AI compounded the challenges of tech worker organizing? Does the new mass opposition to data center construction open up possibilities for organizing?
Tan: AI is dramatically changing the tech industry, creating new divisions between different groups of workers. The vast majority of tech workers will be negatively impacted by AI.
Many will lose their jobs and others will be de-skilled. As a result, a lot of tech workers are moving toward a new politics that’s class-conscious, concerned with affordability, and aware that their companies are sites of class struggle.
Another smaller group of AI engineers, who develop the frontier models and its surrounding ecosystem, are in a totally different position. The bosses covet their skills. As a result, they enjoy a tight labor market and have a great deal of leverage as individuals.
We need different strategies to organize these two groups of tech workers. We’re just beginning to think through how to do this on the new terrain of precarity and division created by austerity and AI.
Additionally, the movement against data centers will have contradictory impacts on different groups of workers. Most of the tech workforce that is being proletarianized will be sympathetic to this organizing.
But the construction workers and their building trades unions at this point are not sympathetic for obvious reasons. They are getting good jobs and contracts to build the data centers.
We have to develop new modes of organizing that are not constrained by the Recognition Playbook, labor law, and a narrow focus on shop floor issues. How can we build a strong coalition of workers, unions, and communities to overcome the divisions the bosses use to pit us against one another?
You point out one of the biggest limits of the Recognition Playbook: its strategy of delaying conflict with the bosses. Could you explain how it does this and how it poses problems for the labor movement?
Tan: The Recognition Playbook’s defers direct conflict with the boss until after organizers win a supermajority for a union election. This deferral does not prepare workers to organize job actions and strikes necessary to defeat the bosses.
Organizers aren’t getting practice in finding out where their leverage lies and therefore how to design a strike that actually works for the tech sector. In retrospect, this reliance on the Recognition Playbook has held back rather than advanced our organizing.
Redwine: The same applies to our reliance on labor law. It is not designed to enable class struggle but ensure class peace — a peace that only benefits the bosses. So, it has a chilling effect on militancy and has constrained workers’ exercise of our power. We need a new strategy to confront our bosses in this new epoch of austerity and precarity.
Press freedom is under attack
As Trump cracks down on political speech, independent media is increasingly necessary.
Truthout produces reporting you won’t see in the mainstream: journalism from the frontlines of global conflict, interviews with grassroots movement leaders, high-quality legal analysis and more.
Our work is possible thanks to reader support. Help Truthout catalyze change and social justice — make a tax-deductible monthly or one-time donation today.
