How Mass Layoffs Changed Working in Tech w/ Clarissa Redwine & JS Tan

0:00SPEAKER_00:Something that we try to make clear in the book is the way that these billionaires treat their own workers is a very good example of how they hope to treat the working class at large. And as they gain more power and more influence over society, these are the kinds of changes they will make. And yeah, we hope that the book gives people, even outside of the tech industry, a glimpse into the threat that these oligarchs pose.

0:52SPEAKER_01:Clarissa helped organize the Kickstarter at Union and co-founded the Circuit Breakers Conference. J.S. is doing his PhD at MIT and writes the value-added newsletter. They're both the authors of Against Tech Oligarchy, Worker Resistance in the World's Most Powerful Industry. Now, we haven't done many episodes on worker organizing in tech in quite a while. And so I figured it was a good opportunity to have Clarissa and JS on because they have both been heavily involved in this space to talk not just about what we're seeing in this moment, but also kind of a bit of the history of how we got here, right?

1:24SPEAKER_01:And what the state of worker organizing in the tech industry actually looks like in this moment. You know, we are hearing about a lot of layoffs in the tech industry right now. And naturally that is affecting not just the people who work in the industry and what it's like to work in tech. Of course, this was previously this job that was, you know, associated with high pay and all of these hard to imagine benefits at these workplaces. But, you know, has that shifted since the pandemic and, you know, this these years-long uh layoffs that we're seeing at the major tech companies at the moment, you know, propelled further in the past few years, or is it is it still the same as it used to be?

2:04SPEAKER_01:I'm sure you can guess what the answer to that is. But then the other piece, of course, is what does that change mean for organizing in tech? And and what form is organizing taking at the moment? Is it different than you know, the late 2010s when we were starting to see a lot more of this really taking off? How has that evolved? How has that changed as the tech companies have also changed and the way that they wield their power has changed as well?

2:28SPEAKER_01:So I think this is a really interesting conversation to get into some of those worker organizing campaigns, what that has looked like, where it's going now, and really, you know, what workers can learn from this history to maybe take forward in terms of future organizing, where things might go, what they might do in their workplaces in order to continue this work of organizing the tech industry. So it's not just these wealthy tech billionaires who are commanding everything, but workers also have a more powerful collective voice in order to push back against the whims of these tech billionaires if they don't like what their managers and their bosses are actually doing, which obviously I think is quite important.

3:07SPEAKER_01:I think you're really going to like this conversation with Clarissa and JS because it digs into a lot of things that I think people who listen to this show are going to be quite interested in when it comes to organizing. If you do enjoy it, make sure to share the show on social media or with any friends or colleagues who you think would learn from it. If you do want to support the work that goes into making Tech Won's Save Us every single week, so we can keep having these conversations, digging into so many different aspects of the tech industry, how it affects our lives, how it affects workers' lives.

3:35SPEAKER_01:And since basically everyone is a worker, you know, all of them and everyone else too. So if you do want to do that, you can join supporters like Sam from Ohio by going to patreon.com slash tech won't save us, where you can become a supporter as well. Thanks so much and enjoy this week's conversation. Clarissa, welcome to Tech Won't Save Us.

3:52SPEAKER_00:Hey, Ferris. Good to be here.

3:54SPEAKER_01:Absolutely. Really happy to finally have you on the show. And JS, welcome back to Tech Won't Save Us. Thanks, Ferris. Great to be back. I always enjoy talking to you two. You guys both have a fantastic new book coming out that I think a lot of people who listen to this podcast are going to be really interested in, right? Because it digs into, you know, organizing in the tech industry, unionization, these topics that we've been talking about for a while now.

4:18SPEAKER_01:Um, but it does feel like, you know, the discourse has kind of shifted in the past few years versus where it maybe was before the pandemic or or something like that. Um so I want to dig into all of that with you, but I want to start by asking about how you each got into tech organizing, you know, what that looked like for you to actually get started in this kind of a movement. And I was thinking maybe Clarissa, we start with you since you haven't been on the podcast before.

4:44SPEAKER_00:Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I got started in the tech worker movement as a tech worker and kind of a techno-optimist in many ways. I was working at Kickstarter, loved my job, and then several turbulent events happened. And yeah, the company felt like it was being turned upside down. And I was just looking to help my fellow coworkers navigate this wild new version of the company that we all joined. Um, so yeah, we we ended up, you know, forming a union.

5:18SPEAKER_00:We won our election. It was the first wall-to-wall union in the tech industry at Kickstarter. And that was a zero to 100 crash course in what unions are like and how they function. And yeah, it was transformative, changed the way I think about everything.

5:35SPEAKER_01:And do you want to date that for us? Like when was the Kickstarter union uh, you know, because it was a significant moment in, you know, the tech worker organizing, the unionization in the tech industry, like around when was that happening and what did it mean for, you know, this wider push to, you know, form unions across the tech industry?

5:54SPEAKER_00:Yes, yes. So the union drive at Kickstarter was just after the explosive beginnings of the tech worker movement in 2018. Yeah, we ended up having our drive throughout 2019 and won the election weeks before lockdown from COVID-19 in 2020.

6:15SPEAKER_01:Yeah, it's it's wild to think. One that it's like so recent, but also that it's so long ago, you know, if that can make any sense.

6:23SPEAKER_00:Yeah, it feels like forever ago, and the whole union is basically new people that have turned over and are keeping the fight going. It's it's kind of amazing.

6:32SPEAKER_01:That's awesome. I feel like Kickstarter has also like it's not as much of a part of the conversation as it was at the time that that was all happening as well. Like as a company, it feels like it's not as prominent anymore, which you know it says nothing about the union, uh, but just interesting how these things change over time.

6:48SPEAKER_00:Yeah, the union's one of the coolest things cooking at Kickstarter, I think.

6:53SPEAKER_01:No, definitely. And and JS, what about you? How did you get involved in tech organizing and and this movement?

6:58SPEAKER_02:Yeah, so I I also was a tech worker. That's how I got my start. I started out at Microsoft, um, my first job out of college, and was part of a lot of the early activism from 2018, in fact. Um, you know, back then, the sort of kind of organizing that was taking place, we might call sort of political activism by workers. Um, and we were primarily organizing around sort of these policy issues, you know, like whether our employers should be supporting organizations like ICE or the Pentagon or oil companies.

7:31SPEAKER_02:Yeah, as you know from our previous chat, and I did end up writing this kind of whistleblower essay for Logic magazine on Microsoft's collaboration with Chevron. Um, and that eventually led to my exit from the industry. But since then, I've stayed involved with tech worker organizing, running this group called Collective Action in Tech with Clarissa and some other friends, um, where the goal is really to support the movement and sort of help give them resources to organizing.

7:58SPEAKER_02:And yeah, and Clarissa and I have actually also uh worked as union staffers for um an international, where we uh helped a bunch of different campaigns across the industry try to get started with organizing as well.

8:11SPEAKER_01:It's wild to think now about you know that piece and the conversation that we were having last year, because you know, when you wrote that initially, it really felt like, you know, certainly there was some talk about collaboration between the tech industry and the fossil fuel industry, but it wasn't nearly, you know, this kind of prominent thing that everyone was talking about, speaking about, you know, campaigning on. Certainly that that was growing at the time.

8:35SPEAKER_01:But now it's like the collaboration between those two industries is just so blatant and so out there, particularly with the data centers and AI and these sorts of things, right?

8:44SPEAKER_02:Yeah. It's it's just out in the open now. And um, you know, I think very much these big tech companies, particularly the hyperscalers, see energy as very much as part of their domain now.

8:56SPEAKER_01:Yeah, absolutely. And I'm wondering how you made that pivot kind of from being at Microsoft, being in the tech company. Obviously, you say you were doing organizing there, you know, while you were, you know, in the in the belly of the beast, uh, so to speak, to then doing that from the outside. You know, obviously you're a PhD candidate now, you're you're working on academia, but you're also working on organizing and supporting unionization efforts.

9:19SPEAKER_01:How did you make that kind of transition?

9:21SPEAKER_02:Yeah, I mean, I I think while I was at Microsoft, um, certainly developing a network of other organizers within the company, but I think one of the really great things about the tech worker movement, especially back then, was kind of how connected many of the different organizing committees were across um the movement. And that resulted in sort of great communities forming, forming and forming organizations like the tech worker coalition. I mean, which which actually started several years prior.

9:49SPEAKER_02:But, you know, for instance, the group, the initial group that formed Collective Action in Tech very much came out of this initial tech worker movement. And and, you know, it was through efforts like that that I think um I was sort of able to sustain both the connections and the interest in staying on staying involved with organizing.

10:07SPEAKER_01:I want to pick up on what you were saying there, but first I want to circle back to Clarissa. And Clarissa, for you as well, you know, you were saying that you were in Kickstarter, you were very, you know, very much a part of this effort to form the union at Kickstarter. How did you also make that transition from, you know, you're at Kickstarter, you're working on that union, to now being involved in, you know, supporting unionization efforts by tech workers more broadly?

10:29SPEAKER_00:Yeah, yeah. At the time, the community was relatively small and tight-knit, like JS is saying, like the first time that we met, we were put on a call together by someone else in the movement to talk about how JS could maybe not get forced out of Microsoft. And because I had also been forced out of Kickstarter for organizing. So that this is like how these paths crossed in the early days. And for me, immediately after being fired for organizing at Kickstarter, I was like, you know, it's such a shame to be pushed out of a union drive after so many learnings.

11:05SPEAKER_00:You know, you have so much experience. And that's exactly why they try to cut organizers out of union drives. So I was like, how, how do I fold this back into the movement so that it doesn't go to waste? And that's what I've been doing ever since. Um, yeah, with Tech Workers Coalition, with Collective Action and Tech, with the conference circuit breakers every year. Yeah.

11:26SPEAKER_02:For both of us, if I could speak for both of us briefly, you know, I think we both really initially believed, and I think still do, that tech workers have this incredible power over the tech industry that as individuals is completely invisible and and doesn't exist. But when organized, I think really is this kind of lever of power that can actually counter some of the decisions and some of the kind of abuses of corporate power that the tech bosses are are doing.

11:58SPEAKER_02:And so I think that that belief is in many ways part of the reason why we both stayed involved with tech organizing.

12:05SPEAKER_01:Yeah, that that makes a lot of sense. And I think that's really well said as well. You know, I want to pick up on what you were both saying there. It's interesting to me that, you know, you were put on this call, you know, a number of years ago. And now after all this time, you know, you're you're collaborating on a book, you know, you're doing all this stuff together. It's very, it was very fateful that that you were put on that that call. But you've both referenced, you know, a tech worker movement, right?

12:27SPEAKER_01:Uh a number of times. What what does that mean to you? What is what is what is the tech worker movement? How would you define it?

12:34SPEAKER_02:You know, the the words just kind of roll off my tongue at this point, partly because of the book, partly because we've been living this for, you know, so many years at this point. But it's funny because now when I talk to kind of younger students coming out of MIT, many of them don't even, you know, have never heard of the term, which you know initially was a bit of a shock to me. So the tech worker movement, I think, sort of in short refers to that explosion of labor organizing and political activism that took place in the tech industry in 20, starting in 2018, um, and importantly by some of the industry's most privileged workers.

13:09SPEAKER_02:Right. So these include engineers, uh, designers, product managers, um, and other highly paid roles. Unlike traditional organizing, however, what I think is quite unique about this movement is that the issues that were being fought over were quite different, right? At least initially, these included things like fighting over these big military contracts, organizing for a greener and more climate-conscious industry, fighting for more ethical uses of AI, and you know, sort of other other sort of large policy type issues.

13:42SPEAKER_02:The other really sort of interesting thing about the movement, I think, is that it also emerged really all at once, really quite suddenly in 2018. Right? Prior to that year, employee protests in tech were practically unheard of, right? The very idea of calling these highly privileged employees workers was also extremely rare and even rubbed some people the wrong way. But by 2018, these protests were everywhere, right? At both big and small companies, and quite literally happening every week.

14:11SPEAKER_02:You know, there were countless open letters being drafted, and they were across the industry being signed by tens of thousands of employees. They organized walkouts, they protested at shareholder meetings, uh, they penned these fiery op-eds in places like the New York Times. And so it was really this kind of watershed moment of tech workers coming together, developing class consciousness, and realizing that they actually have quite a powerful say in how the industry was going to evolve.

14:39SPEAKER_00:Yeah. And one of the interesting things about how class consciousness started to crop up in the tech industry in the late 2010s was this moment where tech workers saw an opportunity to stand for the company's mission. Right. And they, you know, stood up, said, we should take this stance, and company leadership disagreed. That was a moment where workers realized that their interests were more aligned with the working class outside of their own companies than with their company's leadership to begin with.

15:15SPEAKER_00:And that kind of kicked off the tech worker movement where people started to think more of themselves as workers. They started to understand power structures in the workplace and build toward lasting change.

15:26SPEAKER_01:That's fascinating. Because I was thinking, you know, as JS was talking, what was the motivation here, right? You know, if there's so much happening around 2018, we can think of a number of different things happening in that moment, right? You know, where you're not too long into the Trump presidency and, you know, everything that that kind of brought with it. You know, there's the controversy around, say, the Cambridge analytic analytica revelations and how that is changing, how people are seeing the tech industry and how these companies are operating, you know, as 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 or whatnot that uh, you know, was once associated with Google, those things were being unraveled in that moment as well, right?

16:08SPEAKER_01:Like, you know, you 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?

16:19SPEAKER_02:For a long time, tech workers um have been known for having some of the best jobs, right? Some of the cushiest jobs, paid huge salaries, shout with perks. You know, many of them even had the kind of like autonomy in their work that most other workers could only dream of. And so, you know, it is kind of a bit of a puzzle as to why these group of workers ended up engaging in labor organizing. Like you were saying, Clarissa, I think it is super important to sort of place this movement and the rise of this movement in the broader context in which it took place.

16:51SPEAKER_02:Right. 2018, um, the year the movement began, it was also the year, you know, journalists and analysts were were sort of coining the term the tech lash, right? It was this nationwide public backlash against the tech industry that that was previously so celebrated as not only the engine for innovation, but also for democracy and for sort of being this bastion of progressive values. But by 2018, right, a lot of these companies, a lot of these same tech companies started to get blamed for all kinds of societal issues, right?

17:25SPEAKER_02:The spread of misinformation, the emergence of racially biased algorithms, uh the widening of political polarization. And I think, like you were mentioning, most of all, the election of Trump. You know, I think that was also the year in which the public broadly turned against the industry. And tech workers were very much in the middle of that, right? And they sided, in fact, with the public. People like Clarissa and I, when we were joining the tech industry in the 2010s, we very much believed that technology had this democratizing power and that Silicon Valley was going to be the sort of perfect steward or vehicle for this for this vision.

17:58SPEAKER_02:And you know, I'll also say that like Silicon Valley was very much intentional in sort of marketing itself that way, right? They sort of put on this progressive facade. They sort of touted these grand missions about making the world more open, more connected, more democratic. Like Clarissa was saying, when when these companies started to really get put under the pressure of capitalism and forced to profit maximize and build surveillance tools, weapon systems, exploitative, you know, gig platforms and whatnot, it really became impossible to ignore how much the industry had sort of gone back on these early promises.

18:33SPEAKER_02:And and, you know, of course, the workforce saw these abuses of corporate power as a major, major betrayal. By the time the tech lash was in full blow, tech workers also were ready to mobilize.

18:45SPEAKER_00:Yeah. And we we see this over and over again in every stage of the tech worker movement, where these wider upswells of resistance and transformative moments in society, like the Me Too movement, like Black Lives Matter, these are moments where tech workers feel strength in numbers from outside of their workplaces as well, which motivates them to stand up with like righteous, you know, anger and organize for a better society where they have the most leverage, which is at work.

19:18SPEAKER_01:Can you talk to me about that organizing as well, right? Because as you've both mentioned, one thing that seemed really distinct when we think about the organizing in the tech industry was the issues that it was often associated with, right? You know, when we think about unionization, we often think about pay, right? You know, what is kind of the pay package that people are going to be getting to a lesser degree? You know, do working conditions need to change?

19:40SPEAKER_01:Does that need to be bargained? And certainly that was, as I understand, part of the discussion, again, depending on the company that you're talking about. But there was also, you know, this other kind of broader piece looking at societal issues that seem to be driving a lot of that organizing and getting a lot of those tech workers involved. So can you talk a bit about the degree to which it was about those kind of like workplace issues versus those broader societal issues that the tech companies were very much implicated in when we think about climate change and militarization and those sorts of things?

20:10SPEAKER_00:In the early tech worker movement, some of the most visible demands from tech workers were less related with what the labor movement terms bread and butter issues, like pay, hours, things like that, basic benefits. Um, and it was it was more tied up with how the technology was being wielded in society or how the company was reproducing systems of oppression like sexism. Um, these were sort of like larger issues in a way that went beyond the shop floor.

20:46SPEAKER_00:Uh but that being said, after those huge walkouts and amazing moments that catalyzed the tech worker movement, many tech workers that saw retaliation from taking part in these actions were more marginalized, you know, were the more precarious workers at these companies. And that led tech workers to this idea that we need lasting structural power that will allow us to defend these massive wins that are on the horizon or that we've won already. And that meant that a lot of the early union movement in the tech industry was led by the most precarious, most low-paid, um, most exploited workers at these companies.

21:33SPEAKER_00:And Kickstarter is a great example of that. You know, that the trust and safety team, one of the lowest paid, hardest work teams, underappreciated teams at Kickstarter. The people who worked that team and did that work, they were the ones leading the union drive, you know, setting examples in how to organize and building power because they understood how important it was to balance the power in the workplace. The characteristics of the tech worker.

22:00SPEAKER_00:Movement where we say pushing back against the military, you know, these really exciting radical things were also inextricably linked to bread and butter issues that would help empower workers to have the stability that they needed in order to engage in these struggles.

22:17SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I think that makes a ton of sense, right? And one of the things that really came to mind, even as I was listening to you answer that, right, was obviously a big focus of mine and my early, you know, kind of work writing about tech was on the gig economy, right? And I feel like that was, you know, a really distinct part of this organizing too, where you certainly had the focus on the militarization, the climate issues, these sorts of things.

22:39SPEAKER_01:But there was also this, whether it was at, you know, say, say Google or the major tech companies, looking at these workers who were independent contractors within the organization and treated very differently from like the full-time employees who are at Google. And many people, I think, didn't even, maybe even don't realize to this day that, you know, a company like Google relies a lot on workers doing the same tasks as you know, employed workers by Google, um, but they are not employed the same way, they're paid much less, they don't have access to the same degree of benefits, you know, all that kind of stuff.

23:12SPEAKER_01:But then, you know, you look at a company like Uber, and I feel like you didn't see, at least early on, a ton of organizing on like the kind of white-collar side of the company for you know, lack of a better way to put it. Um, but there was a lot of organizing by the drivers and the food delivery couriers in order to address the way that their work had been defined by the company. And, you know, I think that there were sometimes issues with the degree of solidarity that they were getting or not getting from those more white-collar workers, the ones that were properly employed by Uber and things like that.

23:43SPEAKER_01:So I wonder what you make of that kind of dimension of the organizing too. You know, Uber is this example where you're right.

23:49SPEAKER_02:I actually don't think, at least off the top of my head, I'm not too familiar with the kind of organizing that did or did not happen at um, you know, its corporate office. But I think broadly speaking, the way I sort of see this is that the tech bosses themselves are extremely, extremely worried about sort of this kind of coalition building. You know, one example of this that comes to mind is when the Amazon employees for climate justice, in sort of their early years, when they reached out to sort of their counterparts in the warehouses to sort of organize with them around issues that sort of emerged from COVID, sort of public health and safety issues, the employer, Amazon, was very, very fast to shut that off.

24:32SPEAKER_02:And in fact, to even fire immediately the two lead organizers who are responsible for building those connections. Um I think that just reveals really how much of a threat this kind of coalition building can be to the industry.

24:47SPEAKER_00:So for the past few months, I've been supporting an underground campaign at one of these major tech companies. And there are divisions in the workplace between, you know, contract workers, full-time workers, visa holders, non-visa holders. And one of the biggest barriers that we've seen throughout the tech worker movement up until today is that the full-time workers with arguably the most power in the workplace have a hard time standing in solidarity with other groups when they don't see that they have leverage to bring any kind of power to the table.

25:29SPEAKER_00:You know, it's very hard to stand up when there's a small group of you in the workplace that really, in practice, you don't actually have collective leverage yet, you know, and that is something that tech workers on the full-time side are struggling with today is that they want to stand in solidarity, they want to help, but they don't feel that they yet have the leverage to do so and actually take a meaningful risk. That's been true throughout the tech worker movement, where when there are stands of solidarity, most of the time they're symbolic simply because tech workers haven't yet found leverage that's meaningful, um, not because there's a lack of will or class consciousness or solidarity.

26:12SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I think that makes a ton of sense. And I'm wondering as well, you know, you've mentioned movements that you were involved in, you know, movements that we saw in that period. Are there any that really stand out to you from this, you know, kind of key moment in tech worker organizing in the tech worker movement? Um, you know, from that, you know, 2018, 2019, 2020 period that really made an impact, like a lasting impact that really stand out to you and that people should be aware of if maybe they're not already?

26:41SPEAKER_00:Yeah, well, Kickstarter United, shout out. Um, that was that was an amazing campaign, mostly because at the time people were like, can there be unions in tech? Will it will these workers pull it off? Do they want it? What will they do with it? You know, that was that was an amazing moment in in the movement. And another another moment that stands out to me before I let JS jump in was somewhat of a cautionary tale for the movement that we talk about in the book, which is Mapbox, you know, this open source mapping company infused with venture capital cash that basically killed their union drive, a very promising union drive.

27:23SPEAKER_00:We as a movement took a lot of learnings from that moment. And one of the biggest learnings was that we should not be constrained by the norms of established labor organizing. So, for instance, it's very normal for a group of organizers to focus on US workers because that is who is eligible to vote in a union election in the United States. Um, and that was one of the big things that undermined the union drive at Mapbox was the international workers feeling left out of the loop and feeling, yeah, they they weren't a part of this big moment and management used that against the union.

28:02SPEAKER_00:Yeah, so that was a campaign that really, at least for people inside of the movement who are following the movement, that was a big moment.

28:10SPEAKER_01:Can I ask you just briefly before JS jumps in with his? You know, when you're talking about that kind of US-international divide, does that mean trying to work more, you know, as kind of US-based unions with more international ones, if they are international companies, to like create a movement that is crossing borders or what have you? What does that look like in practice, I guess?

28:33SPEAKER_00:Yeah, yeah. So another another big moment was the Google walkout around, you know, sexual misconduct in the workplace and systemic sexism. You know, that was a really good example of tech workers thinking critically about what pressure on their company would look like without any notion of the norms of labor organizing or labor, labor law. Uh so what these workers did was they, you know, built uh coordinated action, a walkout, across the world, in offices, in cities, everywhere.

29:07SPEAKER_00:Um, and you know, when you know, we we have this really great moment in the book that JS penned, where workers in the US were waking up to workers across the world who had already walked out and there was already news coverage. And that was a really good example of workers going, what will make our boss listen and come to the table? And it does not stop at the edges of the US.

29:33SPEAKER_01:No, that makes a lot of sense. Go ahead, JS. What's yours?

29:35SPEAKER_02:Maybe I'll uh bring up this one case that's a little bit more obscure in sort of the the tech worker movement, but it was in 2019. What happened in China actually was that tech workers were starting to mobilize um across their industry against uh the 996 working schedule, right? The working schedule of 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. six days a week. That was this really big online mobilization that happened in China. It happened primarily on GitHub because even the tech workers there are using GitHub.

30:10SPEAKER_02:But what was really interesting with that protest was that when I was working at Microsoft, um, which by the way owns GitHub, one of the things that myself and the sort of group that I was organizing with decided to throw our support in for was to organize a sort of solidarity campaign with the 996 movement in China. You know, it took the form of an open letter, and initially we had only Microsoft employees signing it, but eventually we realized that we should open it up to the rest of you know, to other US tech workers.

30:41SPEAKER_02:And we what we saw was this sort of huge outpour of support for the Chinese mobilization. And I think, you know, I raise this not because it was uh, you know, a an action that sort of won something big or something like that, but it it was kind of just this interesting moment in which worker solidarity across these two countries. It was sort of the first time we were seeing that happen. And and I think it was also particularly important for that to happen, especially in those years where sort of US-China tension was extremely high.

31:15SPEAKER_02:Of course, this tension has continued into today. And so I think that is really just the case for continued solidarity and and sort of cross-learnings by tech workers on on in in sort of both these countries.

31:29SPEAKER_01:That's a really good point to add an international dimension to the conversation as well, right? You know, very much not just something happening in the US, but many other countries seeing tech workers organizing, you know, movements on this front, that sort of a thing. I I'm wondering, you know, we've really been talking about the kind of 2018 to 2020 period, which you describe as kind of the the peak of this movement. 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.

32:01SPEAKER_02:So I I think 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 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 uh 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 lot of individual bargaining power.

32:31SPEAKER_02: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 that the tech billionaires themselves have also shifted to the right. What our our book tries to do anyway is we try to tell the story of these two shifts through the story of class struggle and how it was that class struggle, and in particular the tech worker movement, right, that we've been talking about, has transformed, has has sort of brought about these two changes in some ways, but have also responded to these changes.

33:08SPEAKER_02:I think one of the key things underpinning these two, these two shifts is really a major change that happened in the financial environment. Right. So, you know, after 2008, huge financial crisis of 2008, right, the Fed brought interest rates down to zero and essentially kept it at close to zero throughout the 2010s. And, you know, this became known as the ZERP years, right, or the zero interest rate phenomenon years. Um and this created a very special environment, I think, that incentivized, especially the tech industry, to bet heavily on the future.

33:41SPEAKER_02:And to do so, they they aggressively expanded their workforce. It was kind of this era where demand for tech workers far outpaced the supply of it. However, when COVID hit in 2020, and and later when inflation due to COVID surged in 2022, the Fed quickly raised interest rates for really for the first time in a sustained way to in order to keep the economy cool, right? And and for tech, this was really, really disastrous. Right? The industry was essentially built on this kind of cheap capital that allowed it to sort of make these huge, huge bets on the future.

34:17SPEAKER_02:But all of a sudden, this kind of future-oriented model became untenable. And for the first time, really, since the dot com the dot-com crash, the industry went into a recession. For the tech labor market, that was a huge shift, right? All of a sudden, tech workers going from a very tight labor market where they had a lot of individual power, right? They could sort of uh jump to another company if they felt like they weren't being treated right or whatnot, all of a sudden the tech labor market had loosened incredibly.

34:49SPEAKER_02:And individual tech workers had lost a lot of their individual power. What has happened since 2022 is that we've now kind of entered this era of sort of consistent and nonstop layoffs, right? I mean, if you look at sort of the layoff charts in the tech sector going back over the past 10 years, you see that layoffs are practically zero. You know, in 2020, it flips a little bit because there's the fear of COVID, goes back down to zero. And in 2022, and really in 2023, we start to see kind of a scale of layoffs that the tech industry had, you know, at least since since I've been observing it, not really happened.

35:29SPEAKER_00:Yeah. And the way that the tech worker movement has been shaped by these changes is very significant. So in some ways, you know, there's this silver lining, class consciousness is at all-time highs, you know. Um, but at the same time, there's so much more precarity, you know, there's so much more fear. Tech workers are less likely to take risks unless they see a real path to victory. Yeah, that has that has had real effects on the movement. But this also means that tech workers are in a state of such crisis sometimes, with, you know, layoffs on the horizon, degrading working conditions, that they are more willing to take direct action to right these wrongs immediately rather than wait for a long-haul fight, which has injected radicalism into the movement in a really exciting way that JS and I try to capture and uh encourage in the book.

36:36SPEAKER_00:Um, yeah. And I think just to just to also speak to something that JS was outlining, tech bosses openly antagonized their workforce for years leading up to these mass layoffs, essentially trying to build consent for treating tech workers like they are being treated today. And that is something that we try to make clear in the book is the way that these billionaires treat their own workers is a very good example of how they hope to treat the working class at large.

37:12SPEAKER_00:And as they gain more power and more influence over society, these are the kinds of changes they will make. And yeah, we hope that the book gives people, even outside of the tech industry, a glimpse into the threat that these oligarchs pose.

37:27SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I think that's really well said. And there's so many things I want to dig into from both of your answers on that, right? And I want to start with, you know, JS, you were talking about all of the layoffs. You know, I've seen numbers from 140,000 to 170,000 just this year alone, right? Laid off from these major tech companies, which is just a staggering number of people losing their jobs. And that's just, you know, the first half of 2026. That's not to talk about 2025 and 2024 when we've already been seeing big layoffs as well.

37:57SPEAKER_01:So, what does it mean to work in tech today? And how has that changed from what we were seeing in the 2010s when uh when you were talking about before? Like, you know, is the promise of a tech job what it was a few years ago? Um, and what does that mean for tech workers?

38:16SPEAKER_02:Yeah, I mean, I I think, you know, to come back to sort of this anecdote of me, you know, chatting with uh undergraduate CS students today, you know, I think it's completely different, right? You know, when when I was an undergrad, also studying CS, uh, computer science, like we were saying, I had this kind of rosy view of what the tech industry was going to be. But you know, today, talking to these undergrads coming out of this department, it's very clear to them the sort of harms and the sort of public image, even that the tech industry has.

38:47SPEAKER_02:A key part of that is this kind of right-word turn that Clarissa was talking about of the tech billionaire class. We spent a lot of time so far talking about tech workers' class consciousness. But I think as part of this kind of process, what happened as well was that the tech billionaires themselves gained the kind of class consciousness, right? We call it in the book the billionaire class consciousness. And you know, this this class consciousness, I think, comes out of seeing the tech worker movement, comes out even more broadly from seeing the tech lash and sort of the turn that the public has made against the tech, the tech industry.

39:26SPEAKER_02:And now with this new financial environment, the tech billionaire class is taking this opportunity to be extremely, extremely vindictive towards the workers who've who who now who they now see as unruly, extremely privileged, and importantly, who they now see as as woke, right? They they they a lot of these tech billionaires, um, quite literally, their analysis of the tech worker movement was that it was these woke values, right, these progressive values that corrupted the minds of their workforce and have and have turned them against the bosses.

40:03SPEAKER_02:And so, you know, to work in tech today versus let's say 10 years ago, it was very common to have things like DEI initiatives. It was very common to talk about uh supporting marginalized groups. Um, it was this kind of progressive vision of tech work. Now none of that is is, you know, that is much more marginalized in tech culture, right? Zuckerberg himself is talking about making culture, making sort of his workplace more masculine, sort of bringing back bro culture.

40:32SPEAKER_02:Elon Musk, obviously, is sort of openly attacking what he calls the woke mind virus, right? And he's doing that by completely eliminating initiatives in AI ethics, completely decimating any semblance of DEI initiatives. Um, and so it's not only that worker, tech workers have lost their individual labor market leverage, it's also that the tech industry has, in response to the tech worker movement, shifted to the right and has shifted the workplace culture in this, in this new and far more right-wing way.

41:09SPEAKER_00:Yeah. And I ironically, some of the very branding that these companies put out in the, you know, in the late 2010s and as tech workers were coming to them in droves helped shift or have helped solidify tech workers' interest in, you know, pro-social missions. And now that their bosses have shifted to the right, you know, again, ironically, that is cleaving them from their own workforce and creating even more resistance in their own workers, where these like surface-level ideals that they once used to talk about having helped keep their workers in line to some degree.

41:50SPEAKER_00:So yeah, it's a it's a very interesting virtuous cycle, maybe. Yeah.

41:55SPEAKER_01:I want to come back to the billionaires in just a second, right? Because I I think it's essential that we talk about them and and you know how their shift, what their shift has meant for, you know, the tech worker movement. But I also want to talk about the workers themselves, right? Because obviously we see tech workers generally as a more progressive group. You know, I remember when I can't remember if it was the first time Bernie Sanders ran or the second time, but like, you know, tech worker donations were overwhelmingly in favor of his candidacy, and if not his, then Elizabeth Warren's, right?

42:24SPEAKER_01:I think that gives a demonstration of uh, you know, where a lot of tech workers stand politically. But even when we were seeing this movement, you know, I remember there was the uh James Damore kind of Google letter back in, I think it was 2017, you know, which was kind of chastising this kind of culture, saying the kind of things that we hear from the tech billionaires today. And I'm wondering, you know, within the views or feelings of tech workers themselves, like to what degree is there that kind of progressiveness that we associate with the tech industry?

42:55SPEAKER_01:And have we seen more of these right-wing ideas that the billionaires themselves are adopting kind of being found within the workforces too, especially as we see more of these layoffs happen and you know, we've seen this kind of political and cultural shift in the United States, but also in other countries as well. I wonder if you have insight on that.

43:14SPEAKER_02:The tech workforce is by no means homogenous. Um yes, certainly there are, there is this strong progressive trend among, particularly, I think, among the tech workers who entered the industry in the late 2000s into the 2010s. Um, many of them they grew up loving computers, loving technology, and sort of really having these almost utopian ideas for what technology could do. I think that kind of thinking in some ways lends itself to a more liberal, um, sometimes even more left wing kind of orientation.

43:46SPEAKER_02:But I think that has also started to change as the tech sector has gone from being sort of this smaller niche, kind of specialized industry to now being kind of the main place that people, that any Any sort of top performing student at a top university, it's become sort of this kind of go-to place for this type of student. And along with that, it's sort of diversified in a lot of the values that tech workers have now. You know, I'll I'll say that also since the right word turn of the tech billionaires, you know, there has also been kind of this new influx of workers who are now just completely okay with sort of building technology for weapons, working much more closely with the military, largely in part because tech billionaires have sort of said it's now okay, whereas in the 2010s, the billionaires themselves were sort of resisting that.

44:44SPEAKER_02:And there is, I think, serious ideological work that's being done to sort of promote this kind of thinking. You know, one thing that comes to mind, for instance, is Alex Carp's book on sort of the technological republic and why the tech industry really needs to be serving the US mission and ultimately the the US military, right? It's sort of this jingoistic tirade against how the sort of progressive strand of Silicon Valley has made it lose lose its way.

45:11SPEAKER_02:Um and I think that that kind of ideological work is also having an effect on some of the workforce.

45:17SPEAKER_00:Yeah, the the tech billionaire class is not wrong. That culture drives either resistance or complacency or compliance. Um, they are right to think that, you know, woke values are driving their workers to stand against them whenever they make non-war woke calls in the workplace. And yeah, they've done a pretty good job at throwing everything they can to turn the cultures, at the very least, internally away from progressivism.

45:52SPEAKER_01:You talk about the billionaires there, and as you're saying, you know, we very clearly see this embrace of right-wing politics and this kind of billionaire class consciousness forming. But when we look at the tech worker movement in the kind of 2018 to 2020 period, it really felt like the tech companies and the tech billionaires felt that they needed to listen to the workers and kind of give in to the demands of workers to a certain degree, right?

46:15SPEAKER_01:Or at least that's how kind of how it felt to me. And as we enter into the 2020s, you know, especially as we get past the pandemic, it really feels that they have shifted, right? That they no longer feel that they need to, you know, listen to those demands, respond to those demands, and that actually they feel much more emboldened or empowered to just try to, you know, fire those workers who are involved in organizing, get rid of them, which is not to say that didn't happen before, but now, you know, it does feel like the vibe has really shifted there.

46:49SPEAKER_01:So feel free to talk a bit about that and and how you kind of see that shift, but also what does that mean for tech organizing then in 2026? You know, what that looks like, how that means strategies need to be different, that sort of a thing.

47:03SPEAKER_00:Now, in the age of austerity, for tech billionaires trying to grind down their workers and extract as much value as possible, they have learned over years of fighting the tech worker movement how to suppress it. So, for instance, you know, they no longer cut out just a few voices that are visibly organizing, they get rid of everyone that they can see. Right. So, a really good example of this was Google workers occupied the offices of an executive, and anyone who was even observing got fired, you know, around 50 workers.

47:42SPEAKER_00:And, you know, there have been union drives at places like Grinder, where after workers started their union drive, management demanded they return to office, but not the closest office to each worker, the furthest office to each worker. It was strategically planned to force attrition. And these are the kinds of tactics that we see. You know, for instance, when Elon Musk took over Twitter, you know, we were there organizing an underground union drive, and we got to see how he concentrated power.

48:19SPEAKER_00:And the way he did that was by completely cutting out entire departments that might be ideologically resistant to his choices, and by creating mass fear and precarity and cutting out any voices of resistance as soon as they speak up. And this is what tech workers are up against now. And they are well aware, there's no secret that their bosses are antagonistic. And that has really forced tech workers to think beyond strategies that might not have yielded real leverage in the workplace.

49:00SPEAKER_00:Now they are looking for real leverage. And that I think is the next chapter of the tech worker movement.

49:06SPEAKER_01:Yeah, it has really been kind of staggering to see this shift. But I think what you say makes a lot of sense, right? You know, in terms of what we have seen change and how that means different tactics need to be taken. I wonder, obviously, we're in this moment the past few years of generative AI really taking off, you know, these AI companies being a much bigger part of the discussion, uh, you know, that leading to, or at least being the justification for a lot of these layoffs that are occurring, or at least part of the justification, you know, JS, you you gave us some of the other reasons that this is happening.

49:39SPEAKER_01: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 tech billionaires and CEOs are pushing today?

49:58SPEAKER_02:That's a great question. And you know, there is already some activism, um, some worker activism happening at these AI labs, um, but also at some of the hyperscalers, right, who are also frontier model developers. Just observing it so far, it does seem to me like it echoes a lot of the early tech worker movement type of activism, um, in that they're sort of immediately mobilizing around issues like the military. The one example that comes to mind from recently is was when Google and OpenAI employees organized an open letter to um ask their companies to sort of take a similar stand as Anthropic did when it comes to sort of um autonomous weapons and domestic mass surveillance, um, in terms of you know how the Pentagon could use their models.

50:46SPEAKER_02:So I I think it's definitely happening. Um but in terms of how AI and you know how AI broadly is affecting the tech worker movement or tech organizing in general, you know, I think it's important to sort of take a step back and try to try to understand generally how how it is that that these um generative AI tools and and particularly these coding agents are are transforming tech work itself. You know, I I I do think, you know, having having sort of talked to many tech workers about this and and playing with these tools myself, that that coding agents like Claude Code, right, are fundamentally and forever changing the industry in in a very important way.

51:28SPEAKER_02:Right. You know, at this point, I I I haven't spoken to any friend in the industry um who has written a single line of code themselves in months, some even in in as long as a year. I've played around with these tools, I've been able to build projects in a matter of hours that I know would have previously taken me weeks. And so, you know, I I think this is a technology to be taken quite seriously. Um the way I see it is that it is clearly a case of techno technology de-skilling workers, you know, at least de-skilling the current craft of writing code.

52:01SPEAKER_02:And in the next few years, I think it's unquestionably going to be highly disruptive to the to the industry, you know, to the composition of each individual firm, um, and certainly to its workers and how they how they go about work. But but what I'm not sure about is that that this technology will ultimately lead to fewer jobs in software. Right. In fact, I'm I'm even quite open to the possibility that this will increase the total number of jobs in software, right?

52:27SPEAKER_02:Especially with how much you know easier it is to build software now. People have referred to this phenomenon, you know, it's called the Jevons paradox, um, or Javon's paradox, um, however you pronounce it. Um this basic idea that a decrease in the cost of producing something will ultimately increase the demand for that thing. And you know, it it might be that these jobs may not be sitting in places that we call a tech company or a tech sector, right?

52:53SPEAKER_02:They may spill over to other parts of the economy. And you know, I think that's just to say that, you know, this this kind of pattern of sort of new tools to abstract the work of programming is something that we've actually seen throughout the history of software and throughout the history of programming languages, even, right? You know, when you come back to the 1940s, 1950s, programmers were quite literally writing machine language, right? Binary zeros and ones, shortly after we got assembly language that still required programmers to have highly specialized knowledge of the chips and what the chips could do.

53:29SPEAKER_02:Um it was only later that we start to get programming languages that could compile English-like language into this kind of machine code, and so on and so forth, right, until we start getting languages like C and Java further abstracting along each step. Each evolution in some ways de-skills the programmer of the time by abstracting the concepts and sort of making building software easier and more accessible. The way we might even think of it is kind of, you know, with each new language, there's this transfer of the knowledge of a specific craft that workers have to now transferring that knowledge to the side of capital, to the side of fixed capital that that employers can just buy.

54:11SPEAKER_02:Right. And so, you know, each step you would think actually shifts the leverage from workers to the side of capital. But yet, I think what we've actually seen is that with each breakthrough, the number of programmers actually increased. The amount of demand for this kind of work actually increased rather than decreased. Um, and in fact, at least until the early 2020s, these programmers have had more leverage than ever before. But I think, you know, coming back to the point of agentic coding, you know, I think that there are that that sort of this new kind of technology of agentic coding is is different in two important ways.

54:48SPEAKER_02:So the first is that it has majorly de skilled the current way of doing things without necessarily increasing the complexity of software itself. Right. So in the past, each evolution, you know, with programming languages, with each abstraction, essentially meant that programmers, in a way, actually needed to know more. Because the abstraction that each new language introduced allowed for far greater complexity in a piece of software and what what that piece of software could do.

55:15SPEAKER_02:However, what seems to be happening now is that the agentic coding systems, you know, and the amount of abstraction they're introducing doesn't seem to be paired with the kind of complexity increases. And ultimately, I think that's because what these agentic coding systems do, what these generative AI models do, are ultimately derivative in nature, right? It's very good at producing new context, but for things that already exist. The second thing that I think AI is uniquely good at capturing is unstructured tacit knowledge.

55:48SPEAKER_02:And I think the importance of this unstructured tacit knowledge is in fact one of the key reasons why programmers have recently become so valuable. Programmers have a ton of uncodifiable knowledge about the code bases that they work on, about about the code and how it interacts with other code bases, um, even smaller things, right? And this is exactly the kind of knowledge that AI is good at codifying because it can operate so well with unstructured data.

56:21SPEAKER_02:This long story is really just to say that, you know, normally this process of abstraction and this ability to codify previously tacit knowledge wouldn't be such a problem, right? It's because it in many ways it's just kind of how technology works. But the problem here is that under capitalism, tech companies are the only ones to benefit from this codification because it transforms tech workers' tacit knowledge, right, and thus their value into fixed capital that their employers can own, right, in the form of models, in the form of compute.

56:52SPEAKER_02:And this means that even if agentic coding tools increase the demand for tech workers, what I worry is that tech workers as individuals will be will be robbed of their of their sort of individual leverage. I think that this technology really ought to be taken quite seriously. I I don't think a lot of the layoffs this past year at least has has really much to do with AI. But I do think that moving forward as tech workers, as leftists, we we really have to take this technology quite seriously, because I think it does really threaten the leverage that they have.

57:22SPEAKER_02:You know, I'll I'll end with this little this little spiel with one tiny silver lining, which is something that Clarissa mentioned earlier. I think tech workers are keenly aware of this transformation. If they weren't sort of aware or conscious of the class dynamics before, I think they now are. I think this technology has this immense proletarianizing effect. And and now really is the opportunity to take advantage of that.

57:47SPEAKER_00:Just to give you some examples of what is happening right now in the tech worker movement related to AI, at Kickstarter, when workers went on strike for a historic 42 days, when they returned, management had automated quite a few jobs, like in trust and safety using AI, and then did layoffs when the unit was exhausted from striking. Um this is like a very serious thing, like JS was saying. But, you know, another example is the workers at Meta, which I had the huge honor of being embedded with while they fought back against artificial intelligence and data extraction.

58:27SPEAKER_00:And they won. You know, they they pushed back, they forced management to uh yeah, to stop stealing their data in order to automate their own jobs away. And that was a huge moment for those workers to realize their own power and to think, what can we fight for next? And yeah, that is the way of the tech worker movement.

58:49SPEAKER_01:It's so fantastic to get those concrete examples on top of like, you know, the deep analysis that JS gave us as well for how we're seeing this play out. You know, there's so much that I can ask you both about how the tech worker movement is going, you know, how it grew, you know, all the things that you're discussing in the book and that I think people listening to this podcast are really going to enjoy and, you know, will know a bit about, but we'll also learn a lot from.

59:13SPEAKER_01:Um, so I thank you both for coming on the show, for writing this fantastic book. Um, great to talk to you.

59:18SPEAKER_00:Thank you so much, Paris.

59:20SPEAKER_01:Thank you so much, Paris, for having us. Clarissa Redwine and JS Ton are the authors of Against Tech Oligarchy, worker resistance in the world's most powerful industry. Tech Won't Save Us is made in partnership with The Nation magazine and is hosted by me, Paris Marks. Production is by Kylie Houston. Tech Won's Save Us relies on the support of listeners like you to keep providing critical perspectives on the tech industry. You can join hundreds of other supporters by going to patreon.com slash tech won't save us and making a pledge of your own.

59:44SPEAKER_01:Thanks for listening and make sure to come back next week.