A brewing battle: More IT workers want unions. The industry doesn’t.
Until recently, many tech professionals viewed themselves as a special and respected worker class: highly educated, hard-working, well paid, and in demand. “They considered themselves above unions,” says Zak Thompson, senior software engineer at Kickstarter and union steward at Kickstarter United. 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’t like where they worked, they just moved on: other employers would be falling over themselves to hire them. How times have changed. Now, fed up with mass layoffs, disillusioned with Big Tech’s direction, and stunned by bold management proclamations that AI will displace huge numbers of people in many tech jobs — starting with programmers — interest in unions has risen sharply among tech professionals. Workers in some organizations, including Kickstarter, have already taken the plunge. A surge in interes