How did COVID affect the fortunes of the workers of tech?

COVID was a very unique period for the tech industry because that was a period in which nearly every aspect about the economy was now shifting to digital.

At least in the beginning parts of COVID, those were in many ways a period of boom for the industry, right? The industry was hiring more workers than ever.

And tech workers themselves knew that they were in such high demand that they often hop jobs as a way to get even higher salaries and to get these promotions.

And so, you know, in many ways, this was quite the opposite to what was happening in the rest of the workforce that was being immiserated by the pandemic.

But for tech workers, this all really changed in 2022 as the pandemic was starting to get under control.

Well, at the same time, what was happening was that inflation started to rise dramatically.

How has that shaped the obstacles to organizing amongst tech workers and the lessons that you would draw from your experience?

And JS Tan, talk about your experience at Microsoft.

Yeah.

You know, so I started, um, in the tech industry in the mid-2010s and, um, my first job out of college was at Microsoft.

And, you know, I think- It was around that time where, where this idea that the tech sector, you know, with, with the rise of the internet especially, was going to be this place that could really, you know, push for a more open society, a more connected society, and even a more democratic society.

And so coming out of college, you know, myself and, and a lot of us, um, coming out of these CS departments had these ideas that joining the tech industry and building these internet platforms would, would allow us to do just that.

Um, and so that's what happened to me when I, when I went to Microsoft.

But, you know, I think over the course of the, the, the 2010s, what we saw was that the tech industry wasn't quite, you know, wasn't quite the industry that it had sort of promised, um, to its workers and to the public, right? We, you know, rather than making the world more open, more democratic, we saw it, uh, you know, really be the culprit of misinformation.

Explain that further.

And JS Tan, talk about your experience at Microsoft.

Yeah.

You know, so I started, um, in the tech industry in the mid-2010s and, um, my first job out of college was at Microsoft.

And, you know, I think- It was around that time where, where this idea that the tech sector, you know, with, with the rise of the internet especially, was going to be this place that could really, you know, push for a more open society, a more connected society, and even a more democratic society.

And so coming out of college, you know, myself and, and a lot of us, um, coming out of these CS departments had these ideas that joining the tech industry and building these internet platforms would, would allow us to do just that.

Um, and so that's what happened to me when I, when I went to Microsoft.

But, you know, I think over the course of the, the, the 2010s, what we saw was that the tech industry wasn't quite, you know, wasn't quite the industry that it had sort of promised, um, to its workers and to the public, right? We, you know, rather than making the world more open, more democratic, we saw it, uh, you know, really be the culprit of misinformation.

Explain that further.

experience at Microsoft.

Yeah, so I started in the tech industry in the mid-2010s.

And my first job out of college was at Microsoft.

And I think it was around that time where this idea that the tech sector, with the rise of the internet especially, was going to be this place that could really push for a more open society, a more connected society.

and even a more democratic society.

And so coming out of college, myself and a lot of us coming out of these CS departments had these ideas that joining the tech industry and building these internet platforms would allow us to do just that.

And so that's what happened to me when I went to Microsoft.

Explain that further.

And JS Tan, talk about your experience at Microsoft.

Yeah.

You know, so I started, um, in the tech industry in the mid-2010s and, um, my first job out of college was at Microsoft.

And, you know, I think- It was around that time where, where this idea that the tech sector, you know, with, with the rise of the internet especially, was going to be this place that could really, you know, push for a more open society, a more connected society, and even a more democratic society.

And so coming out of college, you know, myself and, and a lot of us, um, coming out of these CS departments had these ideas that joining the tech industry and building these internet platforms would, would allow us to do just that.

Um, and so that's what happened to me when I, when I went to Microsoft.

But, you know, I think over the course of the, the, the 2010s, what we saw was that the tech industry wasn't quite, you know, wasn't quite the industry that it had sort of promised, um, to its workers and to the public, right? We, you know, rather than making the world more open, more democratic, we saw it, uh, you know, really be the culprit of misinformation.

Explain that further.

And JS Tan, talk about your experience at Microsoft.

Yeah, you know, so I started in the tech industry in the mid-2010s, and my first job out of college was at Microsoft.

And, you know, I think it was around that time where this idea that the tech sector, you know, with the rise of the Internet especially, was going to be this place that could really, you know, push for a more open society, a more connected society.

and even a more democratic society.

And so coming out of college, myself and a lot of us coming out of these CS departments had these ideas that joining the tech industry and building these internet platforms would allow us to do just that.

And so that's what happened to me when I went to Microsoft.

But I think over the course of the 2010s, what we saw was that the tech industry wasn't quite wasn't quite the industry that it had sort of promised to its workers and to the public.

Your response? Well, actually, since you work for Microsoft, Chase Tan.

Mm.

Right? And so if you're a manager and you're seeing the engineer who works for you staring at, you know, his or her terminal screen, y- y- you don't know if they are, you know, zoning out for the day or if they're coming up with, like, a great new idea or a new algorithm.

And so there's always been this really tricky task for management to figure out, how do I get these incentives in place to, to get folks to, um, to really be doing productive work? And I, and I think a lot of that has actually changed over the past couple of years.

You know, starting in 2022, when the interest rate went up, you know, that was a moment in which the sort of balance of power tilted very much so in the favor of employers, and that was a moment in which tech workers themselves lost a lot of labor market power.

And so that, I think, was sort of the first kind of period in which tech bosses started to wanna do things like increase monitoring or increase surveillance or put more and more people on PIPs.

And I, and I think that has only increased over the past year or two, especially now that, you know, these agentic coding systems are around.

I mean, you know, one of the things that we hear all the time speaking to people is that, you know, at these companies, software engineers, they're finding that their bosses want to use AI systems as, like, a replacement for more traditional forms of bureaucratic control.

Mm-hmm.

So, JS, how much of this was obscured or maybe just reported after the fact or forgotten to any degree because of the pandemic? Did the pandemic in any way undermine your ability, this movement's ability to get their message against Twitter out there?

Yeah, it's a great question.

I think the pandemic was a really critical moment.

And in fact, it coincided with a shift, actually, in how the tech worker movement developed strategically, right? Internally is what I mean.

You know, just to give some background to that.

The sort of early stages of the tech worker movement was this period in which there was, like you were saying, like you had read from the book, it was this period where tech workers were engaging and were featured constantly in the media for their activism, right? And that's in part because of the kinds of strategies that they use.

But, you know, as Clarissa had mentioned previously, There was this blowback from the bosses, right? As tech workers continued to do open letters, continued to participate in walkouts, the bosses started to retaliate against their organizers, right? They started to put them on pitch.

So, JS, how much is there bipartisan support for the tech industry destroying tech jobs? Can we vote for the tech industry not destroying tech jobs?

And when we turned away from those very ambitious goals, it, it somewhat slowed the movement's momentum as well.

Yeah, you know, I, I just wanna...

You know, I th- I thought that was the perfect answer, and I just wanna, um, uh- You know, emphasize this one point that Clarissa made, which is that when we as a movement turned towards, towards seeing union recognition as sort of the new North Star, that this was what we had to do in order to win our campaigns, that I think really showed that there was a...

You know, we saw in, in the campaigns that we were involved with that there was this real mismatch between the way a tech company works and the kind of labor strategies and tactics that we were applying to organizing the tech sector, right? You know, the, the, the strategies that we brought, we brought with us, and, you know, in part these were strategies that were passed down by international unions that we worked with, um, and at one point worked for, right? These strategies in large part comes from a, from a per- from a, from an earlier period, right? Where oftentimes, you know, companies were these vertically integrated, uh, uh, giants, right? Oftentimes located in one spot, right? This was kind of more the Fordist model of, of production.

But today, obviously the tech companies no longer operate in that way, right? Tech companies are sprawling, right? Oftentimes their workforce is not just divided across roles, but they're divided across borders as well.

And, and so, you know, when we take the sort of lessons and, and, and w- and if we work in particular within the constraints of labor law that was designed for this earlier period, we're gonna run up against the problem of, of actually finding leverage to take on these companies, right? And, you know, so the one example that we, we keep coming back to is y- you know, on, in the recognition model where we are focused on building these NLRB certified unions, the focus is really on the domestic workforce, right? Because those are the people who are eligible to be part of the bargaining unit.

Whereas tech companies obviously today are, are not constrained by borders.

Did you weigh pros and cons? And especially if people are working at a company where they feel a similar moral conflict, would you recommend that they do the same, or was the price worth it?

You know, tech bosses were looking at Google, Amazon, New York Times, you know, almost every tech company was doing union avoidance Over the past few years, and they saw an opportunity that aligned with their fiscal responsibilities to discipline their workforce with mass layoffs, with return to office, with basically precarity, which is their biggest tool to suppress organizing.

Yeah, and I think the way in which they go about this is also quite interesting, right? And I think it relates to the rightward shift of the tech elites.

If we sort of were to go back to the early tech worker movement and sort of you know, take account of the kinds of things that tech workers were protesting against.

They were sort of like you, like you were saying earlier, um, you know, these social issues, social justice kind of, um, you know, me too, LGBT rights, but as, as well as, you know, anti-militarism, this kind of, this kind of thing.

And, um, And I think the way that the tech bosses basically interpreted this is that it was the kind of progressive values that they had sort of cultivated within the tech industry that had caused their own employee base to turn against them.

And so part of their retaliation against the tech worker movement is to go against those progressive values, right? Is to sort of wage war on what they would call the woke values, right? That had sort of caused the mutiny in the first place, right? And we can kind of see that in terms of how they go about disciplining this workforce, right? You know, when you think of...

Around 2022, 2023, that's kind of a moment in which we start to see tech bosses really go all out on this attack.

tech industry and how these companies are operating, you know, as you're saying, Clarissa, you know, kind of challenging that narrative, but also this notion, you know, of kind of do no evil or whatnot that, you know, was once associated with Google, those things were being unraveled in that moment as well, right? Like, you know, you mentioned one reason for this organizing to be happening, like, was there something broader that was going on as well? Or, you know, other things that were motivating this in that in that time period? For a

Mm

... impetus in many ways for why a lot of tech workers became disillusioned and wanted to, to start political activism within the tech sector.

So this-- in this context, the kinds of strategies that we took up as tech workers, um- Primarily relied on tarnishing what was, you know, up until then mostly a pretty clean and, and, and pristine brand of these tech companies.

And so our strategy really relied on public pressure, um, approaches.

We, we used things like the open letter, right? We sort of organized big showy walkouts.

Um, you know, we sort of organized protests at shareholder meetings.

Um, and, and, and this became a very, at least initially, a very useful way to, to push back, um, against these tech companies and get our demands met because a lot of these companies at that time relied on, on, um, a business model that, you know, ultimately they were sort of consumer platforms, right? So there was this kind of natural coalition between their business models and, and the consumer base.

Um, and yeah, I, I think for us, we, we think a lot about this situation and how we can give people the experience of collective action as quickly as possible before they are out the door.

Sure.

I mean, you know, just really quickly, just to get into that point a little bit more and, and to, and to really one of the core arguments we make in the book, um, it's that part of this kind of rightward shift, this kind of going from, you know, embracing DEI to embracing a more masculine culture is, is very much part of the response that tech bosses had to the tech worker movement, right? If you think of initially when the tech worker movement had started, a lot of the activism was actually kind of over the, over sort of these culture war issues, right? Sort of issues of, uh, you know, pushing back against that contract with ICE or rampant sexism in the workplace.

And at first, the way that these tech companies respond to that was by doubling down on sort of this progressive facade that they're, that they had been putting up, right? Sometimes even ceding to the employee demands, uh, or, or expanding their DEI initiatives and, and things like that.

But eventually, you know, the bosses got fed up.

They couldn't bear the idea of being told, you know, by anyone, least of all their own employees, what to be doing, right, how to run their businesses.

And so part of that transformation we see of tech bosses is really about crushing the worker movement, right? They wanted to take back control over the workforce that they had believed had become too unruly.

And how they go about doing this, I think, is really key, right? In their analysis, the, the kind of mass revolt of the tech worker movement, you know, comes in large part because they saw, they saw these issues as being fundamentally about progressivism or wokeism-

JS, if you don't mind taking this one.

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.

[laughs] Um, and I think that, like, there, that reckoning is only now coming for tech bosses.

They're inextricably linked.

Yeah, and to your point, it is absolutely right that a lot of early technology, especially around the internet, did come from the military.

I'm just thinking of how the military essentially funded the skeleton of the internet itself, GPS systems, and so on and so forth.

But I think what happened was, especially in the late 2000s, early 2010s, was that a lot of companies started to commercialize these technologies and focus on building platforms.

And these platforms, by and large, were consumer-facing.

And they relied in many ways on sort of this kind of tight coalition between consumers and the tech companies themselves.

And so this is kind of the era of Google, but certainly companies like Uber, Airbnb as well.

And this is a very common catalyst for tech worker organizing.

And that's the spirit that we're trying to recapture in the book and invite people to build towards today.

Initially, we did set out to write essentially this kind of a movement book, you know, kind of to tell the story of the tech worker movement, you know, chronicling the what it was, why it came about, how it changed the industry.

But the thing is, I think as we were writing and sort of trying to situate the tech worker movement in this bigger political moment, we found that the tech worker movement is actually a great way to tell this larger story of two important shifts in Silicon Valley.

The first being the shift in the kind of you know, in the labor relations of Silicon Valley, right? You know, when we think to the 2010s and the kinds of jobs that, you know, your average Google software engineer, for instance, was working, it was, you know, it was these cushy, perk-filled jobs.

And now all that is being increasingly replaced with sort of you know, this 996 culture, grind culture that we're seeing in Silicon Valley.

And the other big shift is, you know, as you alluded to, is the rightward turn of the industry.

I mean, as we know from a lot of other work that there has always been this kind of you know, right-wing ideology embedded among some of the tech billionaires.

What was it in the first place? How was it unique or different than what we think of as like a traditional kind of union movement or collective action through labor?

Exactly.

And, you know, that shifted quite suddenly in 2017 and 2018.

We start to sort of see a lot of the tech companies aligning with Trump in some ways or another.

At first, quite slowly, you know, maybe they're taking on a contract with ICE, a contract with the Pentagon, or even more generally, they're sort of going against the kind of progressive ideology ethos that they've sort of pitched themselves as encapsulating, right? So contracting with a big oil and gas company or revealing that their labor practices internally were actually quite shit.

And this kind of lays the ground for the rise of the tech worker movement.

I think there's this other dimension to it, which was leading up to 2018, there was also increasing public backlash against the tech sector, right? I mean, you can kind of remember back in 2008 or so, the tech sector emerging from the financial crisis comes to be sort of the darling sector of American capitalism, right? But over the span of the 2010s, that starts to break down, right? First with Edward Snowden, Revealing that actually a lot of these big tech companies are much more involved with surveillance of people.

Later on, the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

can

I'm wondering, we're now in 2026, how you have seen things evolve since then, what the state of play is at the moment when we think about organizing and unionization in the tech industry? I think

to answer that question, it's important to understand a couple of key changes that have developed in the tech industry.

The first is that we think that tech workers in some important ways have lost some of the leverage that they once had.

If you were just to take kind of a snapshot of tech work in the mid 2010s, it was very much this kind of era of good jobs and workers had a lot of individual bargaining power.

And now that seems to be replaced with, you know, sort of this grind culture, like hardcore, extremely intense work culture in the US.

So that's kind of one change.

The other change is, is that the tech billionaires themselves have also shifted to the right.

How do you see the organizing happening around AI and are we seeing organizing happening at the AI companies themselves? Or are we seeing more of those workers at those companies being more aligned with this different kind of ideological perspective that the tech billionaires and CEOs are pushing today?

You know, I'm wondering, you know, we're now in 2026, how you have seen things evolve since then, you know, what the state of play is at the moment when we think about organizing and unionization in the tech industry.

So I, I think to, to answer that question, you know, it's important to sort of understand a couple of key changes that have, that have developed in, in, in the tech industry.

So the first is that, you know, we think that tech workers in, in some important ways have lost some of the leverage that they once had.

If you were just to take kind of this, a, a snapshot of tech work in the mid-2010s, it was very much this kind of era of good jobs and, um, workers had a lo- a lot of individual bargaining power.

And now that seems to be replaced with, you know, sort of this grind culture, like, hardcore, extremely intense work culture, um, in the US.

So that's kind of one change.

The other change is, is that the tech billionaires themselves have also shifted to the right.

How do you see the organizing happening around AI, and are we seeing organizing happening at the AI companies themselves? Um, or are we seeing more of those, you know, workers at those companies, you know, being more aligned with this, you know, different kind of ideological perspective that the, the tech billionaires and CEOs are, are pushing today?