Representative image (Picture credit: NYT)
Five weeks into a strike at the crowdfunding site Kickstarter this fall, employees were getting anxious. Their union’s strike fund was dwindling, making it harder for some to cover living expenses, and they were unsure if the firm would make more concessions. But the next week, Kickstarter made offers the union would accept, creating a new minimum-salary formula and helping to preserve a four-day workweek. Over the past few years, US tech firms have laid off thousands of employees in a retreat from a pandemic-era hiring spree and an effort to free up cash to invest in artificial intelligence. Even tech companies once thought of as relatively progressive, like Google and Microsoft, have fired employees who have protested over political causes. The firms said the protests were disruptive and potentially unsafe.But tech worker activism has continued amid the crackdown, albeit cautiously. “It’s driving the organising underground, but people are organising,” said Emily Mazo, a doctoral student at Columbia University who studies tech work and worker activism.Google offered thousands of voluntary exit packages this year after the Alphabet Workers Union, named for Google’s parent company, launched a campaign calling for improvements in job security, like a shift away from involuntary layoffs. A Google spokesperson said that the campaign had not influenced the company. After Amazon laid off 14,000 workers this fall, hundreds of employees signed an open letter to management seeking a bigger say in how to carry out layoffs that may result from AI. Over the past two years, a wave of unionising in the video game industry that began with low-paid testers spread to designers and engineers, who joined unions at the Microsoft-owned studios that make games such as Fallout, Doom and World of Warcraft. This persistent activism has to do with a longer-term shift in how engineers and other tech workers see themselves. For decades, they identified as high-skilled professionals who stood apart from the usual management-labour divide. They were well compensated, could change jobs easily and had the freedom to allocate their time as they saw fit. Because of generous stock grants, many thought of themselves as co-owners.The Kickstarter employees didn’t start off wanting a union, but ended up there when the management tried to pull a satirical comic book called “Always Punch Nazis,” which the rightwing wanted to be taken down. Kickstarter always attracted idealistic workers who liked its mission of helping creative people get projects off the ground. The employees got their way, but it was one of a handful of incidents that prompted them to organise a union. Prominent tech executives and investors reacted differently to instances of activism. A few, including Microsoft’s president, Brad Smith, decided their companies had more to gain than to lose by staying neutral when employees tried to unionise. Others regarded it as evidence of left-wing radicalism. “The kids turned on capitalism in a very fundamental way,” tech investor Marc Andreessen had told NYT.Beginning in late 2022, tech and video game companies reinforced a ‘worker identity’ as they began to lay off thousands of employees. Among the exceptions are artificial intelligence researchers, who have been the beneficiaries of billions of dollars of investment and spending by tech companies. JS Tan, a former Microsoft engineer who is now a doctoral student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and wrote the paper with Mazo, said that those researchers had effectively displaced app and web developers as some of the most sought-after tech workers, and that many software developers increasingly feared downward mobility.Meghan Day, a Google engineer who was recently elected treasurer of the Alphabet Workers Union, said workers were demoralised by layoffs at the company in 2023 and 2024. Google declined to comment.Two Amazon engineers who requested anonymity said they felt Amazon was laying off workers so it could free up money for AI infrastructure, the value of which they questioned. They also said Amazon pushed the remaining employees to pick up the tasks of ousted co-workers. Go to Source
