The Future of Tech Labor: How Workers are Organizing and Transforming the Computing Industry

TL;DR

This paper explores how tech workers are organizing collectively to improve conditions and challenge unethical practices amid industry precarity, highlighting their motivations, strategies, and future prospects.

Contribution

It provides qualitative insights from interviews with tech worker-organizers, revealing the challenges and strategies in their movement to empower disempowered workers.

Findings

Tech workers face fragmented and unstable environments.

Organizers focus on community building and political awareness.

Despite difficulties, a resilient movement is emerging.

Abstract

The tech industry's shifting landscape and the growing precarity of its labor force have spurred unionization efforts among tech workers. These workers turn to collective action to improve their working conditions and to protest unethical practices within their workplaces. To better understand this movement, we interviewed 44 U.S.-based tech worker-organizers to examine their motivations, strategies, challenges, and future visions for labor organizing. These workers included engineers, product managers, customer support specialists, QA analysts, logistics workers, gig workers, and union staff organizers. Our findings reveal that, contrary to popular narratives of prestige and privilege within the tech industry, tech workers face fragmented and unstable work environments which contribute to their disempowerment and hinder their organizing efforts. Despite these difficulties, organizers are laying the groundwork for a more resilient tech worker movement through community building and expanding political consciousness. By situating these dynamics within broader structural and ideological forces, we identify ways for the CSCW community to build solidarity with tech workers who are materially transforming our field through their organizing efforts.