A few things have come up this morning that led to this article. First, the brilliant engineer and even better writer Scott Smitelli wrote this article about the abhorrent conditions of on-call work that engineers are faced with. If you're not familiar with on-call practices in the industry, I highly recommend you read it: it's eye-opening and horrific. Second, the legal erasure of trans people in the USA continues, with Montana passing a law banning trans people from using the toilets at all in general public spaces. This is straight out of the Nuremberg laws, and while this is restricted to the USA at the moment, it's hard not to see this as part of a wider global pattern of attempting to push trans people out of public life entirely. Even when it's not legally imposed, it empowers literally every petty bigot to act with impunity to screw us over, even in places as far afield as New Zealand, where Brian Tamaki and his blackshirted thugs are quite happy to storm libraries hosting a drag science event. And finally, I have been worn down beyond anything by the fact that I'm a year in to running my business today, and I have encountered more practiced, habitual and shameless liars than I would ever have thought this world had space for. We have three points here: one political, one personal, one social, and all of them needlessly awful.
Both me and a lot of people around me have written extensively about the issues that we face in the tech industry, both inward and outward facing. Some of us have attempted to essay potential solutions, but on the whole, I don't believe we've had a coherent strategy for fighting back against this shit as an industry. So, let me propose one: we, as an industry, need to unionise quickly, effectively and on a massive scale. We need, in short, to do what Solidarity did.
Why unions?
If there's anything that all of these situations have in common, it's that they demonstrate that we can't rely on individuals, or even groups of people, to fix this. We need to build strong institutions that can fight for us, and we need to build them in such a way that they represent our interests. And if we're organising as an industry, whatever institution we pull together will likely look a lot like a union.
The institution that brought down the Russian-backed regime in Poland wasn't a campaigning group like the ones we have in the anglosphere (and I'm sorry, Marxist-Leninists, but most of what you do in the anglosphere falls into this category). It wasn't a vanguard party, and it wasn't a militant group. It was Solidarnośc, an independent trade union, and there are important structural reasons for why a union was able to do this when nobody else could.
The fact is, most of us spend the preponderance of our waking hours at work. We spend the preponderance of our time with our colleagues. And most of the resources we have available come from our work. Organising around work is thus the obvious thing to do. We have reach in our workplaces that we might find difficult to have elsewhere, we know what issues we can organise around, and we're all, broadly speaking, in the same place. Workplaces are also organised in both formal and informal manners, which is important for bringing structure to the institution that non-union organisation often struggles with. Finally, while organising puts strain on everyone's time, doing it in a work context, or even at work (I'll touch on the legality of this later) significantly mitigates that problem.
Looking further afield, the reason that Solidarity was able to extend its influence beyond simply the workplace and attack political structures more generally was that it started out in the Gdansk and Gdynia shipyards, which were an industry of massive strategic importance for the Polish regime. These were shipyards that built a large part of the Soviet, Polish, East German and Yugoslavian navies, and a significant amount of their merchant shipping besides: these workers needed to be on-side. And right now, we in the tech world are in a very similar position. Governments rely on us to administer their countries, they rely on us to maintain their defence and surveillance apparatus, they rely on us to keep public services running... there's very little, these days, that governments can do without tech. And that's to say nothing of the private sector. In short, we have a hell of a lot of leverage at the moment, which we can see play out even now with Musk's memecoin cabal. While Doge has done an unreasonable amount of damage, and will continue to do so, their ability to cause damage is sharply limited by the fact that Musk is relying on a guy who called himself "big balls" online to do this. Part of this is obviously Musk's need for sycophants, but there's also the fact that at this point, no competent engineer will willingly work with Musk and his cronies. And this is entirely uncoordinated. Can you imagine what might happen if a co-ordinated union at somewhere like Amazon were to throw their weight around? True, we can't undo the damage, but if we start organising effectively now, we can put some serious effort into preventing further harm.
Finally, Solidarity succeeded socially because everyone had some level of investment in the cause on a social level: the union started out as a solidarity strike for a worker who was fired five months before retirement for political activity. Sure, not everyone's going to be political or explicitly want to unionise, but very few people wouldn't show up to support their friends. Everyone cares about basic dignity on some level, and this grew into demands for human dignity in the face of a regime that expected lying and cowardice as basic moral duties. Solidarity, consequently, was able to tap into a very wide variety of potential supporters, from the Catholic Church (A core component of human dignity is the right to practice your own religion, which the regime suppressed), to opposition leftists and liberal civil rights activists, to regular workers who simply wanted better conditions. And right now, in tech, we're in a similar situation. It's difficult to describe to techies exactly how fucked up the average experience of technology is, and our lives are increasingly filled with people algorithmically stripping us of our dignity by means of vibe-coded Node app so that they can pump up profits by another 15%. Tech is generally shit, actively hostile to users and often deliberately engineered to be confusing, at the same time as an increasingly large proportion of our lives is funnelled through tech. People are exhausted, they feel faintly sick about the whole thing, and they would be very willing to act to get it to change if given the opportunity. Artists are increasingly affected by AI slop, as are a whole range of other people. If us tech workers come together to demand that our employers stop doing this shit, whom do you think they're going to side with?
How to unionise tech people
First of all, we have some good news. People in the industry have already started to unionise: in the face of unbelievably hostile behaviour, warehouse workers at Amazon formed a first union in 2022, and significant effort is going into encouraging tech workers to get engaged with this drive as well. I myself have been a member of the Aotearoa Tech Union during those time when I'm meaningfully in the industry, and unionisation drives are a small but consistent presence in the industry as of 2025. So, work has already been done to start making this happen.
However, there's more to do. The vast bulk of our industry is still not unionised, all while mass layoffs are gutting the industry, people who really should know better keep pushing LLM shit and the global political situation seems to be somewhere between "barely adequate" and "actively on fire". We need to be able to resist the slide into horrific conditions, both in our workplaces and in wider society, which means we're going to need much more a union movement than we currently do. Here's what we could plausibly do to build one.
One option that's recently been somewhat successful has been to replace the leadership of existing unions that have become defunct and replacing them with radicals. This has significant advantages: you inherit a lot of organisational structures and infrastructure that you'd otherwise have to build from the ground up, you have a base level of legitimacy and you already have a significant membership base. However, existing organisations can be hidebound, and more to the point, simply don't exist in most of the industry that we're working in. This means that, for better or worse, we're stuck trying to build from scratch.
Unfortunately, a lot of tech people don't much like the idea of unions or don't really think about them. Communication is thus likely to be something of a challenge, and we need to think carefully about how to persuade people in ways that they find meaningful to them.
Initially, at least, I think solidarity actions as discussed above are an excellent way to mobilise support. It might be difficult to sell "you need to fight your company", but fighting for a colleague who was unjustly fired is a much easier proposition. Given the number of trans people and people of colour I know who are currently being essentially purged from tech jobs, many of whom will presumably be liked by their colleagues, and the fact that this likely to continue, there will be plenty of opportunities to build a movement by fighting for the people being screwed over by your company.
Working conditions are also a significant concern. While pay as such isn't a concern for most engineers, on-call hours and similar things often mean that engineers find themselves working at rates below minimum wage for startling amounts of time. As discussed above, on-call hours are also massively disruptive, and it's positively ludicrous that they aren't compensated. Similarly, workers have the right to the tools they need to do their job: lobbying for decent computers, automated testing and the right to work in languages fit for the task they've been set would all be excellent things to fight for.
On a similar note, the 2022/2023 tech layoffs, which have been continuing up until now at a slower pace, are an excellent touchpoint. Many engineers (including me, alas), have still not returned to full-time permanent work, and have been left to try and scrape something together for ourselves. Many more engineers have been forced to take roles at rates of pay and conditions that they would not previously have tolerated. And with current US policy being what it is, neither of these things are likely to get better any time soon. People are struggling, and they're deeply upset about this. Moreover, a lot of people who might previously have identified with their employers and not wanted to join a union are currently quite disillusioned with the entire industry: giving people a way to change a situation that they don't like is an excellent way to get a movement to grow.
I won't lie, this is going to be bloody. In the USA you can certainly expect mass, illegal firings of union organisers, and given the current situation, I honestly wouldn't be surprised if organisers get disappeared, or the regime hires the Pinkertons again, or something horrifying like that. Even in countries with adequate labour laws, retaliation is common, and employers will resort to all kinds of underhanded tactics in order to win. This isn't for the faint of heart. However, at this point, the risk is significantly lower than the risk of not acting: after all, you're likely to just get fired anyway for no particularly good reason, or even replaced by the Electric Moron which is Wrong About Everything. There's no guarantee that not acting will protect you, and organising can win you the important things: freedom, human dignity and a fair day's wages for a fair day's work (for example, pay for being on-call).
Finally, a note on legality: in many countries, there are legal limits on what unions can and can't do. There are laws about organising, whether strikes are legal or not... a hundred little things. We're probably going to have to ignore a bunch of them if we want to be successful.
What to do with the power
Workplace problems
Collective contracts are probably the first step: right now, there is an unconscionable level of difference between conditions of employment even within the same company. Collective contracts set standards for pay, working hours, locations and conditions, as well as benefits in a way that makes it much harder for companies to mistreat workers: and, because the union negotiates on behalf of the entire workforce, you have much more leverage to fight for a good contract. Even if there will be some reduction at the very top of the pay-scale, almost everyone does better out of collective contracts, and even the people who lose out in salary benefit from a better workplace and benefits and humane work conditions.
Similarly, having a union to represent you in the case of employment disputes and unfair treatment by an employer is a massive thing. Employers, on the whole, are cowards. While they will quite happily try to screw you over when they're confident you can't fight back, fighting costs money. Even if a company wins a case that goes to court, it's often not worth it to them to fight it, and thus, even the indication that you can defend yourself will cause them to back off. Union advocates and union lawyers are an excellent deterrent against maltreatment.
Finally, tools and methodology are absolutely a thing that a good tech union should be fighting for. CI/CD and automated testing are very important for the health and wellbeing of engineers, as are decent computers, a decent workspace and not being forced to use AI for everything. Likewise, not being forced to endure SCRUM is of considerable importance to many engineers. We should thus fight for proper tooling and not being SCRUMLorded as much as anything else in this section.
Fighting against bigotry
It's my firm belief that unions don't simply have a responsibility to their workers: a union should defend workers from the moment their CV arrives in company systems. This means that a first order of priority for us should be to demand fair, transparent interview processes from employers. Criteria should be clear, objective and assessable in a fair way. We should insist that interviews not take place until an applicant pool representative of the population is assembled, and we should take all available measures to debias every step of the process.
Similarly, I am of the view that tech unions should create an interview insurance scheme for people disadvantaged when applying for tech roles. Trying to find work or contracts as a trans woman can be genuinely painful due to the sheer amount of rejection you end up facing, especially when it's clear that a startling amount of it is due to your transness. I imagine the situation is similar for other people who have to deal with this kind of bullshit. The idea, therefore, is as follows: unions and employers (ideally: we can do it without the employers, but they should) pay into a fund controlled by a third party that can be appropriately invested to maintain a return on the investment. If someone from a marginalised group interviews a sufficient number of times and is found to be broadly capable, but is still rejected, they receive a payout from this fund to help with the costs of living and interviewing and maybe even, heaven forfend, letting them take a break. The benefit to the interviewee is obvious, but I firmly believe that this will also be beneficial for the industry, as it would help significantly with retaining people in the industry, and thus the supply of talented engineers, which even in this era of supposed oversupply is pretty fucking tight.
Finally, while I suspect this ship may have sailed, strong, sustained pressure against ditching DEI initiatives is important. I've written about DEI initiatives in the past, not particularly positively, but this was all these companies were willing to do. They don't get to just roll back rights unilaterally.
Politics more broadly defined
This is the point at which we switch from "things that most unions do" to specifically Solidarity-type stuff. The first step, of course, is to refuse to do any work that gives aid or comfort to the current regime in the USA. Any kind of military or law-enforcement related project should be off the table, as should anything involved with intelligence.
Going a step further, unions should block projects involving Generative AI or LLM applications: while some valid applications do exist for these tools, there are surpassingly few of them, and at this point, the entire industry is tacitly supporting the fascist takeover of the USA. On principle alone, therefore, they should be opposed.
Any unions at social media companies obviously have their work cut out for them. The likes of Facebook and Twitter have done more than anything to bring us to this pass, and thus, unions at these places must, at the minimum, demand the immediate rollback of all the enshittification measures that these companies have inflicted on us over the last ten years, along with a strict and enforceable code of ethics going forward. This might be impossible, but it's the only reasonable thing to demand at this point.
Outside of the USA, unions should lobby hard for a foreign policy that maximises the pressure on the USA to change course, minimises foreign dependence on the USA for defence and infrastructure needs (a shocking amount of government infrastructure overseas is on AWS or Azure, which currently presents a massive security risk) and develops local industry rather than outsourcing everything. This might, ironically, involve carefully chosen and selective tariffs on industries that we wish to develop, but it might also involve developing new trade relationships to reduce dependence on US trade.
This is a time where everything is at stake and everything is possible. As technical people, we find ourselves at the centre of it: so much depends on us, and so many of the people we've let represent us have gone full fascist. We need to show up for ourselves, represent ourselves and fight against this abuse of what we do in the service of fascist violence. We need to organise ourselves. We need unions.