Unions Can Save Tech Workers and Tech Work

As a California tech worker (where the article is focused), I have zero interest in joining a union and firmly believe that much of what has been possible as a tech employee (high paying, interesting career) is in part because we don't have unions, and instead employees own equity and get valuable skills.

Modern tech workers arguably have the best career deal in the history of humankind. I see no upside in killing the goose with the golden egg.

This is essentially a story about front-line traditional desktop support/sysadmins at a public university.

It's not going to be the same story at much higher paid shops where workers often have equity, good benefits, and the market has provided access to other jobs if you lose yours (in my experience, there are still shortages of qualified and competent engineers).

I would like a different method to deal with the pitfalls, but the politics, drama, overhead, and costs of unionization just don't interest me. I'm not interested in being at one job for life.

My ask for these is always the same. I just want to see how this union would work, specifically.

Don't compare it to other unions or say it could be like X. Just write a few hundred words on what it would actually be like.

This article is really about IT support, not "tech" workers.

What tech workers need, if they need anything, is a professional organization like lawyers, doctors, and architects have.

Was part of the frontline effort to get our colleagues into UPTE. As we move towards AI automation, we need to make sure that workers have a seat at the table when we impact our students, patients, and our research across the state.

For all of the high compensation tech workers can make in specific regions, at specific firms, how is it that they lack the leverage to demand something as basic as remote work, or as simple as not working in open offices? Consider the ubiquitous distaste for the open layout, how it creates distractions, damages flow state, that "no one" actually likes to work in a bullpen. Yet for all the grousing that software engineers do about them, they're still the prevailing industry trend. For like two decades now. In the status quo, where's the worker power to stand against that?

My experience has been that most tech employees are "exempt" employees, but other than being denied overtime pay, they're mainly treated by employers as non-exempt. Exempt was meant for organizations full of professionals who are generally autonomous, which rarely is the case in tech, especially software development where the micromanagement can be extremely high. Tech workers aren't treated like doctors and lawyers. Employment law shouldn't pretend that they are.

Unionization of the industry is long long overdue, if for no other reason than professional ethics.

A small town lawyer can fuck up paperwork badly enough that they lose their ability to practice law. A software engineer can fry the brains of hundreds of thousands of people and it's all ok so long as they managed to get a few of them to click ads.

It should have the same requirements for personal liability like other professions do.

For some tech workers maybe but the issue is that for much of vc backed tech work, Marxist analysis a la Jacobin et Al do not work. Marxists delineate the working class from the owning class but in my experience in these vc backed startups and large public companies that come out of them, the working class quickly becomes part of the owning class.

The union would only serve to make sure that transition never took place.

No thanks, I'll take my seven figure options please.

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CONTRIBUTORS

Dan Russell is president and chief negotiator of the University Professional and Technical Employees–Communications Workers of America Local 9119.

Max Belasco is a University of California, Los Angeles School of Law business systems analyst 3 and chapter cochair of University Professional and Technical Employees Los Angeles chapter.

Aaron Petcoff is a socialist activist who lives in Brooklyn.

This is the absolute last thing that tech needs. What a blow it would be, a nightmare.