Hey there. Welcome to Computer Says Maybe. This is your host, Alix Dunn, and as you probably know, in this show, we talk about all things technology politics. In this episode, I want you to cast your mind back to October twenty twenty-two, when Elon Musk had just taken over Twitter. Before employees could sort of get organized and potentially organize a strike to, uh, protect themselves and the good parts of the company, um, he fired eighty percent of the workforce, and it shocked a lot of us.

I personally thought that the website was just gonna, like, go down, which obviously didn't happen. Well, at least not technically. But it also revealed where the tech industry was headed: automate the work so that the company can keep running with or without a workforce, um, who, uh, is able to have normal jobs, uh, where they're treated properly.

And if that's the goal, to sort of automate out the workforce, what power do tech workers actually have when they want to contest their working conditions or the political decisions that the leaders of these companies are making? Well, in this episode, I am delighted to be in conversation with tech worker organizers Clarissa Redwine and J.S.

Tan. In their new book, Against Tech Oligarchy, they take us through the recent history of tech worker organizing over the last decade, the letters, the walkouts, the union drives, and walk through what it will actually take, um, for tech workers to build the kind of leverage we've seen in other labor movements, and how much that matters for people who are not tech workers.

So I'm very excited to bring you a special episode today, the release day of Clarissa and J.S.' new book, where they unpack all of this. We get into what's worked for tech workers, what hasn't, why things fell apart after twenty twenty-two, and why labor protections for tech workers isn't necessarily the same thing as having political leverage to influence the decisions that these tech companies are making.

So let's get into it

I'm excited to welcome the two co-authors of a new book called Against Tech Oligarchy, and I have them both here. I'm JS Tan. Um, I'm formerly a tech worker, spent many years working and organizing in the industry, and I'm now a PhD candidate at MIT. I am Clarissa Redwine. My pronouns are she/her. And yeah, wrote this book with JS, very proud of it, based on many years of organizing.

Uh, and right now I am helping an underground union at a big tech company build some power and win some material change. So you all wrote a book about, uh, something that you describe as the sort of tech worker movement. Do you wanna situate us in the arc of history of this tech worker movement, and then say a little bit about why you decided to write a book about it?

So the, the tech worker movement is what you're referring to. It's, it's been, it's been going on since about, really I would say 2018 was, was sort of the main year in which things really took off. Things started percolating definitely in the years prior to that. But 2018 was really the year in which we saw this sudden explosion of labor organizing and political activism in the tech industry, and in fact, by some of its most privileged workers, right?

So folks like software engineers, designers, managers, and other, you know, highly paid roles. Unlike traditional labor, what's quite unique about this particular movement is the sort of set of issues that are being fought over, and I'm sure we'll sort of be able to talk about that in, in much more detail.

And so, you know, these were things like contesting military contracts, you know, organizing for, for companies to adopt greener and more climate conscious policies, the ethical use of AI, and sort of these other kinds of issues. And so that, that was really the, the beginning of the tech worker movement emerging quite suddenly in 2018.

You know, I think for an industry that's been going on this long, it's perhaps even surprising in some ways to think that there has been no, like practically no sort of wide scale labor movement prior to this. And that, that is what I think makes the year 2018 particularly interesting, right? It was kind of this moment where, you know, protests by tech workers were happening suddenly everywhere at big and small companies and, and almost every week even.

And so that was kind of the beginning of the tech worker movement. Although, you know, as we write about in our book, it's sort of changed quite significantly over the years, um, as the strategies of both workers and management have shifted. Do you wanna lay out the kind of big key phases of this? 'Cause I feel like the book kind of takes us [00:05:00] through a pretty fast, um...

I don't know. It's a bit of a rollercoaster. Um, at the beginning it feels like there's loads of momentum with some of the walkouts, and this organizing gets a lot of media attention, and then it kind of starts to change, and it evolves quite quickly. Do you wanna give us kind of a sense of the big phases of this, um, recent history?

I'll jump in for this one. Um, so I, I think, you know, the way we sort of have been conceptualizing the tech worker movement, you know, from 2018 or maybe even before that to about now is sort of in three dominant phases. The first phase, um, we would sort of mark as between 2017, '18 to about 2022. This was an era where tech worker activism was being reported about every single week.

There were literally, you know, countless numbers of open letters being drafted. They were being signed by tens of thousands of workers across the industries. Um, [00:06:00] workers were participating in things like walkouts. They protested at shareholder meetings. You know, they even wrote these op-eds for places like The New York Times.

And really this phase can be characterized by, by this set of strategies that tech workers took on. These were strategies that really relied on applying a- Public pressure to their employers, right? The sort of analysis was that these tech companies had this kind of natural coalition with, with consumers, and they, they cared very much about their sort of public image.

And one of the best ways to sort of apply leverage to, to get what workers wanted was to shame and blame them in the public. Certainly, there were a lot of sort of one-to-one organizing grassroots kind of relationship building type organizing to sort of facilitate that kind of strategy, but that was kind of the dominant strategy in sort of what we, what we sort of conceptualize as the first era.[00:07:00]

The second era, um, was quite a dramatic shift, and I think it really begins with, with Kickstarter and, and in particular, the union drive at Kickstarter, right? Kickstarter was the first tech worker union, wall-to-wall union, um, to achieve recognition. Um, and this was kind of a really breakthrough moment for the tech worker movement because prior to this, there wasn't really this kind of clear effort or this clear strategy that tech workers needed to first and foremost win a union in order to get their demands met.

And when Kickstarter workers won their union, it was kind of this moment where a lot of tech workers, particularly tech workers who had been involved in prior cases of activism, really shifted their strategies and started to see, you know, driving towards union recognition as the new North Star of the movement And so, you know, that kind [00:08:00] of kicked off this new period of tech organizing where workers were very eager to affiliate with international unions.

They were very eager to adopt the strategies of traditional labor organizing. And within the span of just a couple of years, we started to see over a dozen unions across the industry pop up. I think the f- the third phase is quite a different phase because it's primarily driven by kind of changes in the financial environment as well as changes by the employers themselves, right?

So 2022 was kind of the year in which inflation starts rising quite rapidly as a result of supply chain constraints from COVID. The Fed, as a result, starts raising interest rates for the first time really in, in, like, a decade. And, and that basically pulls the tech sector into a recession. So all of a sudden, the kind of labor market condition for tech workers had completely shifted, right?

In the prior 10 years to [00:09:00] that, tech workers had really a lot of leverage in the labor market. You know, they could easily job hop. They were highly sought after. Companies were, in fact, overtly courting them, right, with these jobs that are full of perks and, and, and these large compensation packages. And all of a sudden, that job market kind of completely shifted in 2022, and, and what commenced was essentially kind of this new era of layoffs in the tech sector.

And so that new financial environment also enabled a kind of response from employers who, you know, were, were much more all of a sudden now willing to get rid of workers who were participating in dissent, who were causing them trouble. And so in this kind of what we sort of conceptualize as the third phase of the tech worker movement, we're now in this kind of situation in which it's much more riskier to participate in collective actions, in organizing.

Tech companies themselves are [00:10:00] much more eager to shed their workforce, to cut costs, and, and that has, we think, completely changed the organizing climate Yeah, I was really struck in the Matte Box example, the use of the employment environment and the economic environment as a way of kind of spooking people to sort of introduce and accentuate both precarity in terms of, "If we don't succeed financially, you will lose your job, and that's a very real possibility.

Stop being so confident that this industry is always gonna be getting bigger and bigger." But also, "If you do this, we might not succeed, and then you will lose the valuation of the equity that you have been paid." Like, I thought that Matte Box, like, very tangible kind of turning of the tide of an organizing effort was really brass tacks, like really harsh.

And I can imagine being a tech worker in that situation and feeling the, the real sort of twisting of the screws intentionally in that kind of third phase, and it was a really kind of like the dar- [00:11:00] darker part of the book where you're like, you feel this momentum, and then you're like, "Ugh," but then conditions change, and it really weaponize...

It makes it possible to weaponize this environment that we're all experiencing. Yes. Yes. And it's, it's funny, this is a common union busting tactic to say, "If you unionize, the plant may shut down. The factory may close." At Kickstarter, you know, we didn't necessarily have the kind of VC funding that Matte Box had.

Management still wielded this threat that the company could go under if we unionize, and, you know, people didn't have stock that was worth anything in Kickstarter. It was more losing the mission, losing this tool for creators everywhere that was such a threat. But one thing I wanted to add on to JS's overview of how tech has shifted over the years, how the power dynamics between workers and bosses have changed, is at the beginning of the tech worker movement where there were these big walkouts, their, [00:12:00] the shame and blame game that JS was talking about, this was a strategy that was successful because our bosses cared about how the public viewed tech so that they could shape policy in their favor.

And the period that followed that, where tech workers were seeking unions, seeking the structural power, that was an attempt to build collective power that would skirt around potential firings. You know? We saw some of the leaders of these big walkouts get fired. But really, that period of building unions in the tech industry was quite a quiet period of class conflict until suddenly in 2022, our bosses became much more antagonistic, and tech workers were not prepared for that environment because we had not had class conflict in so long, and that's something that we try to lay out in the book.

I found the class consciousness thing really interesting, [00:13:00] 'cause it f- I mean, it felt like in the kind of first phases you described, the organizing was largely around political moments, frustrations, feeling like companies' values were being expressed in ways that were misaligned with what they had performatively been before.

Um, and then it moved into this kind of brass tacks, like, no, you're an employee, and really we have to form a union before we can then have leverage in the company, otherwise you'll just get pushed out when you try and change these things. Can you describe a little bit about the connection between those two things?

Like, what is the relationship between those two phases of working and organizing? One of the biggest mistakes that we made as a movement was tech workers had this strategy of public pressure, you know, wielding PR against our companies when they cared about it. Then we thought majority support in the workplace was a pressure tactic, which it was not, right?

That's what the period of unionizing was, was an attempt to get as many people as possible to [00:14:00] agree that we're working together to put collective pressure on the boss. What we didn't understand was that that is not pressure in itself. You need to be able to halt revenue. You need to shut your platforms down.

And that is something that the period of building unions delayed us learning because we, you know, won elections that would take a year, sometimes more. We sat at the bargaining table politely talking to our bosses for a year, two years, three years, and we never learned how to shut down our area of the company, how to halt revenue.

And that is a recipe for failure, especially when the boss puts more pressure on workers and tries to drive down working conditions. So it became a very asymmetric war. Yeah. What I'm hearing you say is that the prestige of employees was declining, and that actually, as the economy changed, as the industry changed, the leverage and [00:15:00] specialness of tech workers kind of went down, which meant that, like, to actually turn the screws on the boss, you had to find ways that directly affected revenue that wasn't about you being a particular class of worker, but it was instead your ability to actually disrupt the normal business operations of, of the company.

Right. In- Yeah ... in a way, tech workers were, for the first time, coming up against the challenge that every worker who organizes comes up against, is how do I disrupt economic... Yeah. Go, go for it, JS. Yeah. And I, I, I think it's really worth kind of thinking about the differences i- in terms of work when it comes to tech work.

One of the major things that most tech workers are doing on a day-to-day basis is automating profits for their employers, right? When you think of building a platform, when you think of building a piece of software, whether you're a designer, whether you are a software engineer, whether you're, you're a product [00:16:00] manager, your work is going into sort of the creation of this piece of software that can then run without the sort of sustained labor input of these workers.

And so when it comes to the kinds of strategies that tech workers needs, need to think of in order to apply leverage, in order to apply pressure on their bosses, they have to think quite differently from other sectors, right? If you think of a factory or a hospital, you know, when workers walk off the job, the factory shuts down, right?

The hospital can no longer operate. But with tech work, it's completely different, right? We've seen in, in couple cases when, you know, when tech workers stop working or, for instance, when Elon Musk fired some 80% of Twitter, Twitter didn't completely shut down, right? It kind of kept operating. And I, I think that's a really important sort of nugget that, you know, tech workers kind of have to take away if they're to really think about the kind of [00:17:00] leverage that, that they have as workers Right.

And, and just to add on to that, so something that we share in the book that we have not shared publicly really is that at the time of Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter, we were building a union underground. We were staff supporters. And when we saw that he was planning mass layoffs, we thought the platform would go down.

We started organizing a strike, which is something that we talk about in the book, and Elon's response was to freeze the code, essentially, you know, halting production from the bosses' side, and the platform kept running. And that was a major lesson for us that I think all tech workers could benefit from.

I also thought Twitter was gonna go down. I was like, "There's no way that you can fire this [00:18:00] many people and have it, the wheels not come off." I was expecting the fail whale to appear at some point very soon after he took over, and it did not. Y- you also talk in the book about why tech workers aren't necessarily incentivized, uh, or naturally good organizers.

Do you wanna talk a little bit about, like, why sometimes it has been challenging for you when trying to instigate tech workers to participate in these union efforts? You feel like maybe as a class of worker it's been a little bit harder than maybe others? I think it's helpful to look at the tech worker movement, the beginnings of the tech worker movement.

You know, why did these highly paid workers with a lot of relative autonomy, you know, a lot of us are told, "Hey, here's the goal. You figure out how to reach it." Um, that gives you a sense of being in control of your working conditions, and you may have snacks on campus, you know, all of these perks. So we found that almost every [00:19:00] successful, significant union drive in tech or organizing instance in tech came out of a moment of class conflict where workers felt betrayed, saw something that could not stand in the workplace or how their companies were impacting society, and took a stand, and earnestly tried to put pressure on their bosses to win something material.

And that moment of class conflict ended up being a moment of clarity for a lot of workers where they realized- Mm-hmm ... "Oh, the bosses' interests do not align with my own like I had thought all this time. We are not on the same team. I am not a soon-to-be entrepreneurial founder like everyone else." So that, that was a really important mechanism for transforming tech workers into a workforce that can organize and are interested in building collective power.

Um, yeah, [00:20:00] JS, I don't know if you wanna add to that. Yeah. I mean, I, I think also to maybe get to some of, like, the mechanics that your question is maybe prodding at, the tech industry is one in which, you know, a workforce can be highly fragmented in several ways, right? Not just geographically. Well, and certainly also during the COVID years, everyone was wor- working remote.

So that alone makes organizing particularly challenging. Um, but kind of in the structure of tech work itself, there's deep fragmentation across the industry, and even across firms themselves, right? So there's this kind of deep atomization kind of at the structural level in the ways tech companies are organized.

And if you contrast that to, you know, let's say organizing on campus or organizing in a hospital, right? And a single organizer, a single worker organizer can go through a space and on any given day perhaps interact with 20 to 30 people of their coworkers, giving them that [00:21:00] much more exposure and ability to build sort of in-person relationships.

And that's something that's really lacking or that has been lacking in the tech industry for, for quite some time now. Yeah. In, in our book, we point out, you know, there's, the, it's no coincidence that Kickstarter, a relatively small company where almost all of the workers were based in Green Point, Brooklyn, uh, was the first to have a wall-to-wall union.

You know, th- this was a shop where people lived in the same neighborhoods. They ate at the same restaurants. They worked, uh, at desks next to each other. Mm-hmm. Um, that's a characteristic of tech work that is kind of hard to find. Yeah. Like, if you wanna just have a casual conversation or a one-on-one or whatever you all were describing with the recognition playbook strategy where you're like, talk to a colleague, you have to, like, formally put something in a calendar in a way that I imagine creates this sense of distance, sense of intentionality in remote spaces that just doesn't exist in person.

And I imagine [00:22:00] it's just so much harder building trust over the internet than in an office. Yeah. And you bring up trust. Another problem that I think a lot of people can see and relate to is sometimes at a tech company, your direct manager who does a lot of similar work to you or was in your role just a year before is one of your closest coworkers, you know?

So that dynamic is also very tricky. Yeah, there, there are so many aspects of tech that make it difficult for these workers to build collective power. You also mentioned in the book that some of the earlier political flashpoints, I guess, in that kind of first phase that you describe with walkouts and, and other things, that a lot of those were of a particular political bent, um, which makes it more difficult to organize more, more broadly when those are the kind of entry points.

Can you dig into that a little bit more? 'Cause I, I read that and was like, I can imagine that being true. But I can also then imagine you're in a situation where if you wanted to [00:23:00] push for progressive political perspective or, like, wanted to stop particular things that were by nature political, that they would be kind of divisive in some way, and, like, how you see that connecting to the kind of bread and butter union organizing that you call for.

I, I think, you know, early on in the tech worker movement, really most of the sort of key actions were kind of around these big questions of tech policy, like you were saying, right? And, you know, I, I think maybe it's important to step back and try to understand the context for that a little bit. Tech workers were in many ways drawn to the tech industry because Of the promises of the tech industry, right?

You know, for people like me and Clarissa who joined the tech industry in the 2010s, there were these ideas that the tech sector was going to, you know, make the world more connected, more open, more democratic. And I think that was kind of this, uh, this thing that a lot of tech workers genuinely believed in.

And so over the course of the [00:24:00] 2010s, as the tech industry started to do things like engage in military contracts, you know, intensify the extraction of, of oil, when it became revealed that they were sort of in- intensifying, uh, political polarization, right? As all these issues started to come up, I think a lot of tech workers felt betrayed, essentially.

And they felt like these were kind of the core issues that they wanted to push up against. And so that did shape, in many ways, a lot of the kinds of issues that tech workers initially fought for. But at the same time, this was also a period in which the tech sector was, was sort of going from this kind of much smaller peripheral sector into becoming the incumbents of the US economy.

And as part of that process, it was drawing in a lot of people of different ideological stripes, people who perhaps, you know, didn't care so much about some of these [00:25:00] ideological promises that tech companies were, um, were, were sort of saying. And so with these sort of initial sets of actions, it was- Towards the end, I think especially hard to convince people that, you know, we joined the industry not to build weapons, and you should be on our side, and you should sign our petition to push back against that.

And so, you know, I think that is part of the shift towards more bread and butter issues. There was this belief among organizers that with focusing on bread and butter issues, what we could achieve was, was really majority support across the workforce, right? No one is gonna say, "We want..." You know, no one's gonna disagree to wanting better on-call hours.

No one's gonna disagree to wanting, you know, better, better comp. Yeah, but I think it's funny. When, when we saw this shift where tech workers started thinking, "Okay, how do we build majority [00:26:00] support? Let's try to find an issue everyone can get on board with," that ended up being very difficult. You know, not everyone- Yeah

wanted better compensation. You know? Not, not everyone wanted even job security. Some people wanted to be able to take voluntary severance packages. So it, it was very difficult to find, to sort of tr- like transfer some of the best practices of the labor movement onto the tech, especially the office environment, and the, the very things that motivated tech workers to join the tech worker movement and participate in collective action were somewhat abandoned in this period of looking for bread and butter issues that were very hard to find.

Yeah. This is where I kept thinking like, what does the next five to 10 years hold? Is there a way to bring that union power and leverage back to some of those political issues? Or are you kind of saying, "Actually, what we need is a class of... a new class of worker that kind of got hoodwinked [00:27:00] into not protecting itself because of all of the ways that this industry evolved over time, and actually we need a class consciousness.

Um, engineers need to be protecting people that work in the cafeteria, that there's like a, a political awakening probably that happens when people organize and protect themselves as labor"? You don't have to have an answer also. I also... Like, I realize- ... they're like giant society-wide questions. No, this is so, so fun to talk about because I...

So we, in, in the book, we try not to be prescriptive because one of the major points we're trying to make is no one knows how to strike in tech yet. No one knows how to build a credible threat that will bring the boss to the table- Yeah ... yet. Yeah. And, you know, just like other workers in some other industries, like flight attendants using the chaos model, workers need to practice.

We need to see what works. And [00:28:00] I think our, our general take is that we need to engage in class conflict as much as possible in order to learn what works, and we need to have as many workers as possible engaging in class conflict. And if that means that you don't have one single unified issue across the entire union or entire group, that is okay.

Like, y- you need to be, uh, somewhat issue agnostic and supporting whatever prompts workers to fight back. That, that is sort of at least my take. We don't necessarily go into it quite like that in the book, but, um, but yeah, J- JS, how would you answer this question?

Yeah, I mean, that's definitely a hard question. I think it's, you know, certainly a question that a lot of unions across sectors are thinking about, especially leftists from, from the labor movement. For tech, I think there was this idea [00:29:00] that, okay, if this sort of public pressure approach wasn't gonna work, we need to go this approach of winning recognition.

Mm-hmm. And through winning recognition, we can then sort of push for our policy, um, wants through the formal union structure. I think, like Clarissa was saying, this is a strategy. You know, if you're only focused on winning a union, you know, getting majority support, what you do end up giving up sometimes are these sort of moments of minority conflict, and it's, I think, those moments that are actually really critical in, in not only building solidarity, but sharpening every worker's sort of class politics.

And yeah, something that I just wanna make sure is very clear is in this second period where tech workers were attempting to build towards recognition and majority support, often when- [00:30:00] And succeeding And succeeding, yeah. Amazing feats, really. Um, when, you know, when there were workers, even a relatively large number of workers but still a minority, that wanted a particular issue, like say they wanted the company to come out with a statement on Palestinian liberation, often the response was, you know, "There are so many other people who believe in what you believe who are in the union.

Join us. Let's get bigger, let's get stronger, and then we will fight for these things that we all want together at the same time." And it was somewhat of a delay to class conflict, where those workers could have actually meaningfully engaged with how to bring the boss to the table on that particular issue.

Mm-hmm. And then when it did come time for every worker to fight together to win a variety of issues or working conditions- Yeah ... then they would've been better prepared at how to do that in [00:31:00] their spheres of influence within the company. Interesting. So that, that is sort of what we're trying to point out in the book is, like, y- you know, it's, it's almost like you're talking about lifting weights for years, and then you try to lift, like, 100 pounds.

You know? It's not gonna work out well. Not gonna go well. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Right. That's really interesting. I also- As you all are describing what happens to someone when they go through the process of unionization and what happens to the kind of employee base of an organization, it also feels a little bit like because tech bosses have basically had zero accountability, have had zero meaningful pushback, have basically been, um, anointed to be these like, I don't know, kind of Icarus characters and there's no sun.

They're just going up and up and up. Um, uh, I think a lot about laws, like if Elon Musk has a law that he's subjected to, it makes him really upset. It doesn't really matter at, how big the law is, how consequential it is for him. He just doesn't want to have a law that could, like, hold him [00:32:00] accountable in any meaningful way.

And I think there's something about the tech industry that I imagine Bosses feel like unions are a direct threat to their total autonomy over labor and money and everything, and that just the very, like, chutzpah of organizing a union is so politically affronting to them that there's value to that because it essentially puts them in their place in the context of other political conversations where they pretend that, like, it's all, you know, collaborative and consensus-based until it comes to a decision that you disagree on, in which case they will just make the decision and say, "Actually, you have no power."

Like, I can imagine this has a correcting force that is absolutely essential in the tech industry in a way that it has already been won in other industries where people have succeeded in the past to kind of build this understanding that, like, i- if given an inch, [00:33:00] bosses will take a yard. Um, and I think that, like, there, that reckoning is only now coming for tech bosses.

That's a great insight. And to, to sort of zoom out from the, the specifics of the tech worker movement i- in our book, you know, what, what we also try to do is, is kind of situate the tech worker movement within this kind of broader shift that's happening in the tech industry. There's this kind of change among the sort of billionaire class.

Tech billionaires have, o- over the course of the past 10 years, gone from, you know, definitely on the side of the Democratic Party and sort of pushing progressive values even in some cases, to now being, you know, clearly in the Trump MAGA coalition, um, branding themselves as these anti-woke crusaders. And I think, like you were, like you've pointed out, a really key part of that shift that we argue for in our book is that this [00:34:00] shift is, is in part a result of class struggle, right?

When tech workers really started to organize in 2018 and really push back against their bosses on all kinds of decisions, that was kind of a moment in which a lot of the tech bosses were, like you were saying, really upset that they were being sort of told what to do by their own employees. And so the response from these tech bosses was not just to, you know- Take the opportunity to try to bust the unions and to try to cull dissenters.

But it was specifically to target the kind of liberal or progressive even foundations or values that they believed had turned their workforce against them, right? And so Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter is a good example of this, right? He bought the company largely in part because he believed that it was being run by these liberal elites who had [00:35:00] been infected by what he calls the woke mind virus, right?

And so when he bought the company, it was not just a broad attack on the workforce, it was also a targeted attack on the sort of liberal havens of the tech workforce, right? So that meant for him cutting, you know, the AI ethics teams, cutting the human rights teams, these teams that were sort of places in which he felt that, you know, sort of the liberal elite privileged woke workers were sort of gathering, right?

And that, that, you know, Elon Musk is really just the tip of the iceberg. We sort of see the same thing with Mark Zuckerberg, you know, talking about we need to introduce more masculine energy, more bro culture into Meta, right, because- The culture previously had been so neutered. And so there's this kind of, you know, at least at the, at the level of the billionaire class, there's this target towards progressivism, right?

Target against the woke culture, [00:36:00] which they thought had sort of caused mutiny within their own ranks. Yeah. Yeah. And another, like, classic example that we point out in the book is Google quietly dismantling the "Don't be evil," saying that was such a big part of their mission and value set. Yeah, it was very deliberate, and it's part of that rightward shift and that consolidation of power that they felt was slipping at the beginning of the tech worker movement.

I also feel like, though, there was a period of time where we gave them the benefit of the doubt. There was, like, a very long period of time. And then basically they consolidated monopolistic control over our economies, over our daily lives, over basically our entire global experience. Uh, and then they were like, "We've achieved this leverage, so now you don't have a choice.

Like, you can't actually stop us anymore." So I also feel like there was a little bit of, like, they bought themselves time with some of these, uh, niceties. Like when you read... [00:37:00] I, I, I don't know if you have read Careless People. I'm not sure I would recommend it. It's, like, a good beach read 'cause- ... it's kind of shocking.

Uh, it's pa- it's a page-turner. Um, but, like, Mark Zuckerberg was never progressive. Like, Mark Zuckerberg was never- Right ... like, interested in making the world better. He was just a narcissist that had capital and, like, a very clear path to scale in an environment where he was one of the lucky ones that was, like, in the right place at the right time to do the thing that was always gonna happen when we got connected on the internet.

And I feel like there's a... I'm not quite sure what to do with it, aside from maybe learn from that period of, like, ever trusting people that are accumulating that amount of capital, that they'll be, like, good. And if we end up in this situation again, to never give them that space and credit and, like, willingness for lots of smart people to help them kind of construct these things, and then be horrified, um, by, like, what, what happens after.

I hate them. Yeah. That's what I'm saying. Yeah. But- [00:38:00] I mean, don't hate, organize. No. Yeah, no, I think that's a really- Um... Um, I'm supportive. Uh, I've never worked at one. Otherwise, I probably, um, maybe I would have. So when you, like, when we think about that third phase, like, do you wanna describe a little bit of the tactics that they've used to basically just become, like, bog standard union busting organizations and companies?

Do you wanna walk us through, like, h- how that playbook has evolved? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I do think it's maybe useful to, to come back to the example of Twitter and Elon Musk's takeover, because it was right at the beginning of the kind of shift in the financial environment, right? It was kind of just, just a couple of months after we started to see interest rates shoot up.

And, you know, as we know, what Elon Musk did in, after taking over the company was cut some 80% of the workforce. And I think what that did was that it showed the rest of the industry [00:39:00] that you could wage this, this kind of a war on workers at this scale, in fact, and not have it in, in too significant of a way damage the profits of the company or the revenue of the company, right?

And i- if you think about the way the typical tech company worked, and, you know, certainly that's changed kind of in the AI, AI era. But if you think of the pre-2022 tech company, they were fundamentally asset light companies. You know, their key asset was their workforce, right? And what Elon Musk showed was that you can cut a lot of tech workers and not have it, at least immediately, impact your bottom line.

And, you know, so right after, right after the, the, the Twitter takeover, we started to see a wave of layoffs from Microsoft laying off some 10,000 plus workers, Google as well, Facebook certainly as well. And each time [00:40:00] a major layoff was announced, it was rewarded in the stock market, right? There was sort of a bump in the share price.

If in the previous era, you know, that, that sort of phase two that we were talking about, 2020 to maybe 2022, where we start to see the rise of unions. You know, back then, the kind of approach from the bosses was to hire these union consultants and sort of try to be quite savvy in how they, in how they sort of, you know, prevent these unions from forming.

But after 2022, after seeing Elon Musk gut Twitter and continue to operate it as if nothing had happened, there was a very different kind of strategy being taken, right? It was no longer sort of, you know, carefully targeting folks and carefully engineering the failure of a union. It was more just, "We're gonna fire everyone who is involved," or, "We're gonna have these broad threats that sort of, uh, disincentivizes dissent in any way."

Right. Right. And that [00:41:00] was one of the unforeseen shifts that tech workers weren't expecting when we started building unions. Originally, we saw some of the, the leaders of these walkouts, the people who were vocal and visible, be the ones who were targeted and pushed out. But when they were targeted and pushed out, management still put up this facade of them being pushed out for performance issues or changing priorities in the business.

Now, it's-- there's no facade. They're like, "We fired you because you occupied an office and tried to free Palestine. Goodbye." And everyone who was watching, they're gone too. That, that's what we saw at Google. Yeah. At Grindr is another really good example of union busting just with zero mask, where they said, "Hey, we're gonna have a return to office.

Every single worker at the company, you have to return to the office that's the furthest from your home, and if you don't in two weeks, goodbye." Like, the- these are [00:42:00] mass discipline versus targeted scalpel cuts. Uh, and that is the new normal for tech workers. And because we had so many years where we were sitting at a bargaining table trying to politely ask our bosses for material change, we were not prepared for this more acidic environment Yeah, it makes me wonder too, I mean, using Musk as an example is really interesting because you've talked about how to identify tactics that strike at the heart of revenue, but revenue is, like, a very antiquated idea in business these days because basically a lot of these companies are able to access capital based on perceived value.

I mean, like, Musk basically runs very unprofitable companies. So, like, how do you think about this era where kind of old school ideas of revenue don't really matter because there's no physics in valuation of these companies anymore? Like, or, or do you have thoughts about what kinds of tactics might work in terms of perception of value and, and [00:43:00] actually impacting a bottom line?

Yeah, I can, I can start, and JS feel free to jump in. I'll, I'll start with some pretty, like, concrete examples. So, you know, at, at tech companies, you will often have projects that you're working on to implement in the future, you know? Big, big initiatives that are going to make the next quarter, uh, the best quarter yet

Th- these are the things that tech workers are looking at as how do I slow that? How do I halt that sort of future, um, yeah, future... Basically something that's presented to the board as as an achievement. Um, and then also there are these larger swings. You know, we're often seeing the AI race, everyone's getting into the AI race, where tech workers are potentially slowing or jeopardizing the ability for that company to win the AI race.

Um, th- these are sort of the areas of [00:44:00] opportunity for pressure Yeah. Interesting. JS, thoughts on this one? Like, what are the tactics that workers can deploy when revenue is not a thing? I do think it is a really important question, and especially more so in the AI era, right? These companies are not being evaluated by how much revenue or profit they're making, otherwise Anthropic and OpenAI would be the least valuable companies in the world.

Yeah. Um, and you know, the thing is, I, I, I do believe that the tech sector is extremely heterogeneous. Not only are companies across the sector doing completely different things, but also teams within the company are doing different things. And so I think no matter where you are as a worker, you know, where in the industry you are, where across the supply chain you are, this question of where your leverage is is really important.

And, and it's a complex question because it requires understanding the business model of the companies you're working for. It [00:45:00] requires understanding the kind of major sort of political economic shifts that are happening across the sector, right? And so, yeah, I think that's just a great question. Right.

Right. So for, you know, just for instance, there may be a team at a company where if everyone was striking at the same time, that team would really have what they work on go unaffected, right? But if, if they chose to strike at a slightly different time and stagger, then there might be an overall larger impact, and that this is the thing that every tech worker needs to think about.

Yeah, that makes sense to me. I think it's, it's tricky 'cause if when they lay people off, the perceived value of the company goes up, it's like, it's like something there that's like a very... Like, it's a hard trap to get out of. But I imagine eventually when... I mean, gravity must be reintroduced into stock markets eventually.

Um, maybe when that happens, um, it will, it will change things. But it makes me wonder, like, [00:46:00] how do you, and maybe this is sort of thinking beyond now and, like, how you all, when after writing this book, after sort of doing such a deep dive into these different, like, types of organizations, types of struggles, there's, like, I guess two questions I have.

One is these super high-paid AI people that are working in these, you know, small number of, I don't wanna call them labs because that makes them sound like they're doing experiments and engaging in science, which they're obviously not, but, like, what do we do with them in terms of labor organizing and, like, what do you wanna see from them, especially as they start to get these golden somethings from all these possible IPOs?

And then the other thing is what do you wanna see from international unions? Like, how do you see the tech worker movement being held and supported by, uh, kind of a global network of unions that are thinking about this kind of frontier new type of job, um, that we need to find a way to protect? Maybe I can try to answer the first part of this [00:47:00] question, um, first.

Uh, so I, I mean, we wrote a book about organizing in the tech sector and, and I think that's exactly what we should try to do at these, you know, frontier AI companies. Yeah. Um, I do think that, um, the sort of conditions are quite different, right? With the, with the rise of AI and, and in particular these agentic coding systems like Claude Code, I think there is increasingly this clear bifurcation between sort of your standard software engineer or standard tech worker, um, where AI is sort of disrupting their kind of mode of work, um, versus, uh, the AI researchers, right?

So, you know, within a single company you could have both, right? At Google, you certainly have those highly paid researchers who are highly sought after, have sort of that labor market leverage, while also having sort of this broader, uh, workforce of software engineers, designers and whatnot- At a place like Google, um, I, I think there [00:48:00] needs to be this idea to sort of organize together.

I- in particular, AI researchers are coming from a very different sort of context in terms of their own autonomy, their own labor market power, and figuring out how we can sort of build solidarity across the workforce in this way, I think is, is extremely important. That said, there are obviously a lot of different nuances there, right?

A lot of the, the AI researchers are coming from a very different ideological background, right? A lot of them are coming from sort of the AI safety world, and so that might shape the kinds of issues that they care about. But I think these are potential opportunities for workers and unions and leftists in general to sort of help shape the kind of agenda for, for building power in the workplace.

Yeah. I mean, JS thinks about this a lot, organizing that particular group of workers. I think in, in these AI labs and within companies that are trying to build this era of [00:49:00] AI, there are absolutely workers that are trying to just get that bread and escape the permanent underclass. That is- Yeah ... absolutely a part of the workforce.

But there are a lot of workers that are just like me and JS whenever we joined the tech industry, that have somewhat, you know, drunk the Kool-Aid a little bit and feel that they're building something that has the potential to liberate because that's how it's sold to them. And the more that tech workers engage in pushing back and advocating for the world that they believe is just, the more they will come up against the reality that our bosses are not on the same side as the working class and all of the people who join their companies that are trying to build something for society that is helpful and not harmful.

So i- it's only a matter of time before the tech workers at these labs [00:50:00] are saying, "But what you want us to build is gonna harm people. That's not right." And they hear what their bosses have to say in response. So it's only a matter of time. Let me just add one last thing on, on this point. I think right now things are definitely moving very fast, and there's not this kind of clear division between, you know, let's say the ideologies of someone like Dario Amodei versus the workers that he's hiring.

But I do believe that what we'll see over time is that they are gonna diverge in their interests from, from their bosses, right? And, and in particular, in sort of this AI race dynamic- The bosses are not gonna be able to sort of really say, "Let's, let's stop, you know... L- let's, let's introduce these safety measures," or, "Let's stop racing towards ever more powerful models," because they are exposed directly to the forces of market competition.

Whereas workers, I think, have this kind of class position where [00:51:00] it's not 100% of their compensation that is in stock, right? I mean, certainly there's some part of it, but because of this class position, they are in a much better position, if united, to really push back against so- some of these dynamics of competition and racing towards an AGI.

Yeah. And Alix, just to answer the, the second part of your question- Yeah ... about, like, what do we wanna see from these institutions with all of this knowledge, all of this experience- Mm-hmm ... the international unions that are helping tech workers organize, I think they're, they are already doing what we wanna see, which is they are letting tech workers experiment and saying, "You know what?

We've tried for years to build something durable and sustainable, and it's been really hard. Let's start testing what works." And there's been a bit of that from the beginning, but I think at this point, there's a little bit more desperation with the change in [00:52:00] climate and how there are- Yeah ... mass layoffs.

You know, literally the membership is turning over in these unions. So I, I think there's more openness to being a bit more bold, and that's exactly what- Mm-hmm ... is needed right now in the movement. Yeah, that's really interesting. Um, I also like going back to that point about if you're organizing on bread-and-butter issues, to what extent does that actually help you get leverage to do the more political pressure campaigns?

I feel like on AI specifically, if you could get one of the frontier companies to unionize, like, the level of, like... That would have such a dramatic effect on how people are thinking about them and also that industry. And also it feels like that would be the... It wouldn't be a straw that breaks the camel's back.

It would be more like a, I don't know, like a weight on the camel. Like, it would be substantial for, uh, the collapse of these business models. 'Cause, like, [00:53:00] if you had actual worker power within the AI labs, I think that there would be this sense that, I don't know, they can't just lay everyone off and have one guy in a basement somewhere making the next thing, which is kind of the vibe that you're getting now, that they think that they can just fire everyone except for, you know, one 10X, quote-unquote, engineer that they fire every six months when he inevitably burns out and then just replace him.

Uh, and I feel like if you, if you change that dynamic, I think it would really change some of the psychology and kind of political dimension of the economics of, of AI, the AI industry. Is there one you're going for? Yeah. Our DMs are open. No. Like, is there one that you think- I... Oh, I mean, Alix, there, there has already been organizing at- Yeah

these labs that has been incredibly exciting and inspiring for other workers- So cool. Okay ... across the tech worker movement. Yes, and I think, uh, [00:54:00] yeah, I think okay, I'm talking directly to workers in AI labs right now, but- Do it ... something that I think to be mindful of, if you're a worker organizing at an AI company, the, the movement, a lot of workers in the movement would have one big moment where we signed a petition or we did an action, and then would start building toward a union and majority support.

And every action after they chose to go toward unionization was aimed at growth, not at winning. And that is something that every tech worker needs to, like, internalize, that if you are, if you are orienting toward growth, you are not going to learn how to become a fighting union. You have to orient toward winning, and growth will come as a result of that.

So yeah, anyone in an AI lab right now, write that down. [00:55:00] No Thank you to JS and Clarissa for this much needed conversation, and, uh, congratulations to them on the release of Against Tech Oligarchy today. We will link to it in the show notes where you can buy it. I think obviously the last 10 years has been a really interesting sort of twist and turns for tech worker organizing, and it's really nice to sort of get this type of view into it and have people that were a part of this organizing make some kind of honest assessments about where that worker movement is and what we might see in the next few years, particularly given how important it's gonna be for us to find any way we can to hem in the power of tech companies, including helping the people that work there be effective in their advocacy and power building.

So the link to JS and Clarissa's book, Against Tech Oligarchy, is in the show notes. If you found the conversation interesting, and especially if you're a tech worker yourself, make sure to check it out and grab a copy. Thanks to [00:56:00] the team for their work making this podcast happen every week. We will be back on Friday with our regularly scheduled programming, and I will see you then.