The old joke has it that when Google employees are laid off, they would just do a Google search for a new job. That conversation may have shifted in recent months. Now, tech workers who are laid off — or who fear being laid off — might be firing up a search on unions.
Indeed, while there’s been a recent raft of layoffs in the tech sector, there has also been, in the past year, an increase of 200,000 union members, amongst the 16 million members in the US.
Taking a quick step back, the numbers were much higher in generations past. According to Rabble.ca, about 10% of the American workforce is in a union, contrasting to double that amount four decades ago. Almost 30% of the Canadian workforce is in a union, compared to nearly 40% in 1981.
Setting the stage?
Layoffs to the degree we’ve been seeing often prompt unionization talk, and this was no exception.
AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler said in an interview with Bloomberg that workers see an injustice: they don’t see an improvement in working conditions, as their corporations net billions of dollars of profit. In expectation that automation might replace workers, she foresees union contracts that prohibit this.
“That will continue to be a driver for people to say, ‘hey, do we have to sit back and take it, or can we do something about it?’”
In June 2022, workers in a suburban Baltimore Apple store were the first to successfully vote to form a union at one of the tech giant’s stores — a move the company appears to have embraced. Key issues included pay, working conditions, and having a voice at work, said an Apple spokeswoman. This fight came amongst other wider efforts of store workers at Amazon and Microsoft. A second Apple store, this time in Oklahoma, voted to form a union in October.
The Baltimore union reached another milestone in January 2023, entering into collective bargaining with management for the first time.
Meanwhile, Amazon, as of January 2023 lost its fight to overturn its first union, voted on by workers in July 2022. In contrast, Microsoft accepted the results of its first union, with the 300-some workers at ZeniMax Studios.
“Microsoft has lived up to its commitment to its workers and let them decide for themselves whether they want a union,” CWA president Chris Shelton said in a statement. “Other video game and tech giants have made a conscious choice to attack, undermine, and demoralize their own employees…”
For many in the lay-off wave, though, it might be too late. It could take more than 450 days, on average, from the time a union is formed, to ratify its first contract, according to Bloomberg Law.
“Layoffs are shaking the tech industry,” said Clarissa Redwine, Senior Design and Tech Outreach Lead at Kickstarter from Jan. 2016 to August 2019. She said that management fired a third of her organizing committee in the same week — and she was one of them. “The team had 15 years of tenure and were all high performers,” she said.
She was then invited to the Organizing Committee of Kickstarter United just before they took the campaign public.
Kickstarter United was the first wall-to-wall union in modern tech, Redwine said, and recently penned a contract that secured many rights unprecedented in the tech industry, such as guaranteed minimum 3% annual cost of living raises for all employees, a profit sharing bonus pool, salary benchmarking based on a national average, and ‘just cause’ provisions.
Kickstarter United and Tech 1010 from OPEIU held information sessions to discuss how to protect their workers. Redwine added that other workers in the tech labor movement began creating resources that directed tech workers to provisions like the WARN act (Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification) that “might shield them from severe and malicious layoff tactics.” Twitter workers, she noted, crafted a Layoff Guide that went viral in worker Signal groups.
“To challenge layoffs, workers must have the existing capacity to mobilize, and the tech labor movement is still young,” she added. “Only a handful of unions have won elections, and most unions in tech are still underground building quiet power. We have not yet seen a strike to effectively reverse these needless layoffs.”.
“The mass layoffs are encouraging a surge of interest in unions… leadership uses this glut of labour and ‘competition’ to drive down the cost of labor in tech.”
Interestingly, a Harvard Business Review study from May-June 2018 showed that of twenty companies that let go of workers, presumably as a cost-saving measure, profitability actually declined in some instances, for up to three years.
In the wake of so many job losses across the tech sector in such a short period of time, it may very well come to pass that unions, learning from the fallout, will mobilize in greater numbers, preparing for the next round of mass layoffs coming down the pipe.
