Unionize or die June 9, 2025 on Drew DeVault's blog

Tech workers have long resisted the suggestion that we should be organized into unions. The topic is consistently met with a cold reception by tech workers when it is raised, and no big tech labor is meaningful organized. This is a fatal mistake – and I don’t mean “fatal” in the figurative sense. Tech workers, it’s time for you to unionize, and strike, or you and your loved ones are literally going to die.

In this article I will justify this statement and show that it is clearly not hyperbolic. I will explain exactly what you need to do, and how organized labor can and will save your life.

Hey – if you want to get involved in labor organizing in the tech sector you should consider joining the new unitelabor.dev forum. Adding a head’s up here in case you don’t make it to the end of this very long blog post.

The imperative to organize is your economic self-interest

Before I talk about the threats to your life and liberty that you must confront through organized labor, let me re-iterate the economic position for unionizing your workplace. It is important to revisit this now, because the power politics of the tech sector has been rapidly changing over the past few years, and those changes are not in your favor.

The tech industry bourgeoisie has been waging a prolonged war on labor for at least a decade. Far from mounting any kind of resistance, most of tech labor doesn’t even understand that this is happening to them. Your boss is obsessed with making you powerless and replaceable. You may not realize how much leverage you have over your boss, but your boss certainly does – and has been doing everything in their power to undermine you before you wizen up. Don’t let yourself believe you’re a part of their club – if your income depends on your salary, you are part of the working class.

Payroll – that’s you – is the single biggest expense for every tech company. When tech capitalists look at their balance sheet and start thinking of strategies for increasing profits, they see an awful lot of pesky zeroes stacked up next to the line item for payroll and benefits. Long-term, what’s their best play?

It starts with funneling cash and influence into educating a bigger, cheaper generation of compsci graduates to flood the labor market – “everyone can code”. Think about strategic investments in cheap(ish), broadly available courses, online schools and coding “bootcamps” – dangling your high salary as the carrot in front of wannabe coders fleeing dwindling prospects in other industries, certain that the carrot won’t be nearly as big when they all eventually step into a crowded labor market.

The next step is rolling, industry-wide mass layoffs – often obscured under the guise of “stack ranking” or some similar nonsense. Big tech has been callously cutting jobs everywhere, leaving workers out in the cold in batches of thousands or tens of thousands. If you don’t count yourself among them yet, maybe you will soon. What are your prospects for re-hire going to look like if this looming recession materializes in the next few years?

Consider what’s happening now – why do you think tech is driving AI mandates down from the top? Have you been ordered to use an LLM assistant to “help” with your programming? Have you even thought about why the executives would push this crap on you? You’re “training” your replacement. Do you really think that, if LLMs really are going to change the way we code, they aren’t going to change the way we’re paid for it? Do you think your boss doesn’t see AI as a chance to take $100M off of their payroll expenses?

Aren’t you worried you could get laid off and this junior compsci grad or an H1B takes your place for half your salary? You should be – it’s happening everywhere. What are you going to do about it? Resent the younger generation of programmers just entering the tech workforce? Or the immigrant whose family pooled their resources to send them abroad to study and work? Or maybe you weren’t laid off yet, and you fancy yourself better than the poor saps down the hall who were. Don’t be a sucker – your enemy isn’t in the cubicle next to you, or on the other side of the open office. Your enemy has an office with a door on it.

Listen: a tech union isn’t just about negotiating higher wages and benefits, although that’s definitely on the table. It’s about protecting yourself, and your colleagues, from the relentless campaign against labor that the tech leadership is waging against us. And more than that, it’s about seizing some of the awesome, society-bending power of the tech giants. Look around you and see what destructive ends this power is being applied to. You have your hands at the levers of this power if only you rise together with your peers and make demands.

And if you don’t, you are responsible for what’s going to happen next.

The imperative to organize is existential

If global warming is limited to 2°C, here’s what Palo Alto looks like in 2100:¹

Limiting warming to 2° C requires us to cut global emissions in half by 2030 – in 5 years – but emissions haven’t even peaked yet. Present-day climate policies are only expected to limit warming to 2.5° to 2.9° C by 2100.² Here’s Palo Alto in 75 years if we stay our current course:

Here’s the Gulf of Mexico in 75 years:

This is what will happen if things don’t improve. Things aren’t improving – they’re getting worse. The US elected an anti-science president who backed out of the Paris agreement, for a start. Your boss is pouring all of our freshwater into datacenters to train these fucking LLMs and expanding into this exciting new market with millions of tons of emissions as the price of investment. Cryptocurrencies still account for a full 1% of global emissions. Datacenters as a whole account for 2%. That’s on us – tech workers. That is our fucking responsibility.

Climate change is accelerating, and faster than we thought, and the rich and powerful are making it happen faster. Climate catastrophe is not in the far future, it’s not our children or our children’s children, it’s us, it’s already happening. You and I will live to see dozens of global catastrophes playing out in our lifetimes, with horrifying results. Even if we started a revolution tomorrow and overthrew the ruling class and implemented aggressive climate policies right now we will still watch tens or hundreds of millions die.

Let’s say you are comfortably living outside of these blue areas, and you’ll be sitting pretty when Louisiana or Bruges or Fiji are flooded. Well, 13 million Americans are expected to have to migrate out of flooded areas – and 216 million globally³ – within 25 to 30 years. That’s just from the direct causes of climate change – as many as 1 billion could be displaced if we account for the ensuing global conflict and civil unrest.⁴ What do you think will happen to non-coastal cities and states when 4% of the American population is forced to flee their homes? You think you won’t be affected by that? What happens when anywhere from 2.5% to 12% of the Earth’s population becomes refugees?

What are you going to eat? Climate change is going to impact fresh water supplies and reduce the world’s agriculturally productive land. Livestock is expected to be reduced by 7-10% in just 25 years.⁵ Food prices will skyrocket and people will starve. 7% of all species on Earth may already be extinct because of human activities.⁶ You think that’s not going to affect you?

The overwhelming majority of the population supports climate action.⁷ The reason it’s not happening is because, under capitalism, capital is power, and the few have it and the many don’t. We live in a global plutocracy.

The plutocracy has an answer to climate change: fascism. When 12% of the world’s population is knocking at the doors of the global north, their answer will be concentration camps and mass murder. They are already working on it today. When the problem is capitalism, the capitalists will go to any lengths necessary to preserve the institutions that give them power – they always have. They have no moral compass or reason besides profit, wealth, and power. The 1% will burn and pillage and murder the 99% without blinking.

They are already murdering us. 1.2 million Americans are rationing their insulin.⁸ The healthcare industry, organized around the profit motive, murders 68,000 Americans per year.⁹ To the Europeans among my readership, don’t get too comfortable, because I assure you that our leaders are working on destroying our healthcare systems, too.

Someone you love will be laid off, get sick, and die because they can’t afford healthcare. Someone you know, probably many people that you know, will be killed by climate change. It might be someone you love. It might be you.

When you do get laid off mid-recession, your employer replaces you and three of your peers with a fresh bootcamp “graduate” and a GitHub Copilot subscription, and all of the companies you might apply to have done the same… how long can you keep paying rent? What about your friends and family, those who don’t have a cushy tech job or tech worker prospects, what happens when they get laid off or automated away or just priced out of the cost of living? Homelessness is at an all time high and it’s only going to get higher. Being homeless takes 30 years off of your life expectancy.¹⁰ In the United States, there are 28 vacant homes for every homeless person.¹¹

Capitalism is going to murder the people you love. Capitalism is going to murder you.

We need a different answer to the crises that we face. Fortunately, the working class can offer a better solution – one with a long history of success.

Organizing is the only answer and it will work

The rich are literally going to kill you and everyone you know and love just because it will make them richer. Because it is making them richer.

Do you want to do something about any of the real, urgent problems you face? Do you want to make meaningful, rapid progress on climate change, take the catastrophic consequences we are already guaranteed to face in stride, and keep your friends and family safe?

Well, tough shit – you can’t. Don’t tell me you’ll refuse the work, or that it’ll get done anyway without you, or that you can just find another job. They’ll replace you, you won’t find another job, and the world will still burn. You can’t vote your way to a solution, either: elections don’t matter, your vote doesn’t matter, and your voice is worthless to politicians.¹² Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page demonstrated this most clearly in their 2014 study, “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens”.¹³

Gilens and Page plotted a line chart which shows us the relationship between the odds of a policy proposal being adopted (Y axis) charted against public support for the policy (X axis). If policy adoption was entirely driven by public opinion, we would expect a 45° line (Y=X), where broad public support guarantees adoption and broad public opposition prevents adoption. We could also substitute “public opinion” for the opinions of different subsets of the public to see their relative impact on policy. Here’s what they got:

For most of us, we get a flat line: Y, policy adoption, is completely unrelated to X, public support. Our opinion has no influence whatsoever on policy adoption. Public condemnation or widespread support has the same effect on a policy proposal, i.e. none. But for the wealthy, it’s a different story entirely. I’ve never seen it stated so plainly and clearly: the only thing that matters is money, wealth, and capital. Money is power, and the rich have it and you don’t.

Nevertheless, you must solve these problems. You must participate in finding and implementing solutions. You will be fucked if you don’t. But it is an unassailable fact that you can’t solve these problems, because you have no power – at least, not alone.

Together, we do have power. In fact, we can fuck with those bastards’ money and they will step in line if, and only if, we organize. It is the only solution, and it will work.

The ultra-rich possess no morals or ideology or passion or reason. They align with fascists because the fascists promise what they want, namely tax cuts, subsidies, favorable regulation, and cracking the skulls of socialists against the pavement. The rich hoard and pillage and murder with abandon for one reason and one reason only: it’s profitable. The rich always do what makes them richer, and only what makes them richer. Consequently, you need to make this a losing strategy. You need to make it more profitable to do what you want. To control the rich, you must threaten the only thing they care about.

Strikes are so costly for companies that they will do anything to prevent them – and if they fail to prevent them, then shareholders will pressure them to capitulate if only to stop the hemorrhaging of profit. This threat is so powerful that it doesn’t have to stop at negotiating your salary and benefits. You could demand your employer participate in boycotting Israel. You could demand that your employer stops anti-social lobbying efforts, or even adopts a pro-social lobbying program. You could demand that your CEO cannot support causes that threaten the lives and dignity of their queer or PoC employees. You could demand that they don’t bend the knee to fascists. If you get them where it hurts – their wallet – they will fall in line. They are more afraid of you than we are afraid of them. They are terrified of us, and it’s time we used that to our advantage.

We know it works because it has always worked. In 2023, United Auto Workers went on strike and most workers won a 25% raise. In February, teachers in Los Angeles went on strike for just 8 days and secured a 19% raise. Nurses in Oregon won a 22% raise, better working schedules, and more this year – and Hawaiian nurses secured an agreement to improve worker/patient ratios in September. Tech workers could take a page out of the Writer’s Guild’s book – in 2023 they secured a prohibition against the use of their work to train AI models and the use of AI to suppress their wages.

Organized labor is powerful and consistently gets concessions from the rich and powerful in a way that no other strategy has ever been able to. It works, and we have a moral obligation to do it. Unions gets results.

How to organize step by step

I will give you a step-by-step plan for exactly what you need to do to start moving the needle here. The process is as follows:

1. Building solidarity and community with your peers
2. Understanding your rights and how to organize safely
3. Establishing the consensus to unionize, and do it
4. Promoting solidarity with across tech workplaces and labor as a whole

Remember that you will not have to do this alone – in fact, that’s the whole point. Step one is building community with your colleagues. Get to know them personally, establish new friendships and grow the friendships you already have. Learn about each other’s wants, needs, passions, and so on, and find ways to support each other. If someone takes a sick day, organize someone to check on them and make them dinner or pick up their kids from school. Organize a board game night at your home with your colleagues, outside of work hours. Make it a regular event!

Talk to your colleagues about work, and your workplace. Tell each other about your salaries and benefits. When you get a raise, don’t be shy, tell your colleagues how much you got and how you negotiated it. Speak positively about each other at performance reviews and save critical feedback for their ears only. Offer each other advice about how to approach their boss to get their needs met, and be each other’s advocate.

Talk about the power you have to work together to accomplish bigger things. Talk about the advantage of collective action. It can start small – perhaps your team collectively refuses to incorporate LLMs into your workflow. Soon enough you and your colleagues will be thinking about unionizing.

Disclaimer: Knowledge about specific processes and legal considerations in this article is US-specific. Your local laws are likely similar, but you should research the differences with your colleagues.

The process of organizing a union in the US is explained step-by-step at workcenter.gov. More detailed resources, including access to union organizers in your neighborhood, are available from the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO). But your biggest resources will be people already organizing in the tech sector: in particular you should consult CODE-CWA, which works with tech workers to provide mentoring and resources on organizing tech workplaces – and has already helped several tech workplaces organize their unions and start making a difference. They’ve got your back.

This is a good time to make sure that you and your colleagues understand your rights. First of all, you would be wise to pool your resources and hire the attention of a lawyer specializing in labor – consult your local bar association to find one (it’s easy, just google it and they’ll have a web thing). Definitely reach out to AFL-CIO and CODE-CWA to meet experienced union organizers who can help you.

You cannot be lawfully fired or punished for discussing unions, workplace conditions, or your compensation and benefits, with your colleagues. You cannot be punished for distributing literature in support of your cause, especially if you do it off-site (even just outside of the front door). Be careful not to make careless remarks about your boss’s appearance, complain about the quality of your company’s products, make disparaging comments about clients or customers, etc – don’t give them an easy excuse. Hold meetings and discussions outside of work if necessary, and perform your duties as you normally would while organizing.

Once you start getting serious about organizing, your boss will start to work against you, but know that they cannot stop you. Nevertheless, you and/or some of your colleagues may run the risk of unlawful retaliation or termination for organizing – this is why you should have a lawyer on retainer. This is also why it’s important to establish systems of mutual aid, so that if one of your colleagues gets into trouble you can lean on each other to keep supporting your families. And, importantly, remember that HR works for the company, not for you. HR are the front lines that are going to execute the unionbusting mandates from above.

Once you have a consensus among your colleagues to organize – which you will know because they will have signed union cards – you can approach your employer to ask them to voluntarily recognize the union. If they agree to opening an organized dialogue amicably, you do so. If not, you will reach out to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to organize a vote to unionize. Only organize a vote that you know you will win. Once your workplace votes to unionize, your employer is obligated to negotiate with you in good faith. Start making collective decisions about what you want from your employer and bring them to the table.

In this process, you will have established a relationship with more experienced union organizers who will continue to help you with conducting your union’s affairs and start getting results. The next step is to make yourself available for this purpose to the next tech workplace that wants to unionize: to share what you’ve learned and support the rest of the industry in solidarity. Talk to your friends across the industry and build solidarity and power in mass.

Prepare for the general strike on May 1st, 2028

The call has gone out: on Labor Day, 2028 – just under three years from now – there will be a general strike in the United States. The United Auto Workers union, one of the largest in the United States, has arranged for their collective bargaining agreements to end on this date, and has called for other unions to do the same across all industries. The American Federation of Teachers and its 1.2 million members are on board, and other unions are sure to follow. Your new union should be among them.

This is how we collectively challenge not just our own employers, but our political institutions as a whole. This is how we turn this nightmare around.

A mass strike is a difficult thing to organize. It is certain to be met with large-scale, coordinated, and well-funded propaganda and retaliation from the business and political spheres. Moreover, a mass strike depends on careful planning and mass mutual aid. We need to be prepared to support each other to get it done, and to plan and organize seriously. When you and your colleagues get organized, discuss this strike amongst yourselves and be prepared to join in solidarity with the rest of the 99% around the country and the world at large.

To commit yourselves to participate or get involved in the planning of the grassroots movement, see generalstrikeus.com.

Join unitelabor.dev

I’ve set up a Discourse instance for discussion, organizing, Q&A, and solidarity among tech workers at unitelabor.dev. Please check it out!

If you have any questions or feedback on this article, please post about it there.

Unionize or die

You must organize, and you must start now, or the worst will come to pass. Fight like your life depends on it, beause it does. It has never been more urgent. The tech industry needs to stop fucking around and get organized.

We are powerful together. We can change things, and we must. Spread the word, in your workplace and with your friends and online. On the latter, be ready to fight just to speak – especially in our online spaces owned and controlled by the rich (ahem – YCombinator, Reddit, Twitter – etc). But fight all the same, and don’t stop fighting until we’re done.

We can do it, together.

Resources

Tech-specific:

• unitelabor.dev (new)
• CODE-CWA (US)
• Tech Workers Coalition (Global)
• UTAW (UK)
• Prospect (UK)
• Alphabet Workers Union (Google)

General:

• AFL-CIO (US)
• workcenter.gov (US)
• generalstrikeus.com (US)

Send me more resources to add here!