Posts tagged tech workers
Strategic sick days and coordinated slowdowns: the case for sabotage in Silicon Valley
July 27, 2025 // Picture a calendar, not a picket line. A product launch, a quarterly-earnings call, a major app update—those are the heartbeats. Miss one and the body panics. The new method maps three layers of the organism: The skeleton: the technical systems that really can't be turned off. The muscles: the org chart that decides who answers to whom. The nerves: the Slack channels, lunch tables, and after-work gaming groups where work actually gets done.
The Washington Post’s Tech Workers Have Formed a Union
April 8, 2025 // Many employees in the Post‘s newsroom and business operations are eligible to unions, but the tech workers—product managers, system engineers, people who work on the company’s Arc XP content management system—are not, a quirky legacy from the days when the Post located its WashingtonPost.Newsweek Interactive business in the management-friendly commonwealth of Virginia. The Post began to integrate tech employees with its news operations in 2009, but the divide remains. The group organized with the Washington Baltimore News Guild as the Washington Post Tech Guild. In their announcement, they say their organization comprises more than 300 people, the majority of people who work on tech for the Post.
Communications Workers of America File Unfair Labor Practice Charge Against Sony for Violating Labor Law
December 5, 2024 // This week, the Communications Workers of America (CWA) filed an Unfair Labor Practice charge with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) against Santa Monica Studio, a Sony subsidiary based in Los Angeles, Calif., alleging that Sony limited protected organizing activities on their property in violation of Section 7 of the National Labor Relations Act.
Today’s hospitality union battle is over wages. The next one might be about tech.
December 5, 2024 // The following year, the Culinary Union added language around technology adoption to its contract. In its contracts negotiated in 2023, the union “protected and expanded” that clause, Bethany Khan, a union spokesperson, told Hotel Dive. For members of the Culinary Union, their technology-related worries go beyond robot replacements — encompassing everything from workflow-optimizing apps to artificial intelligence. And while the union’s contract language offers protections around how technology is used at hotels, it does not prevent companies from deploying new technologies in the first place.
NY Times tech union’s bizarre demands to avert strike include four-day work week, ban on scents in break rooms
September 19, 2024 // Tech union workers at the New York Times have threatened to strike on Election Day over a bizarre list of demands that include pet bereavement leave, a four-day work week — and even a ban on scented products in break rooms, according to a report. The Times Tech Guild’s laundry list of demands during its protracted two-year battle for a contract has also included a call for unlimited sick time, job security for non-citizens who are in the United States on work visas in the event of layoffs and mandatory trigger warnings when discussing news events, Semafor reported.
The year labor organizing came to tech
December 13, 2022 // Tech's labor organizing is still in its infancy. Only a few unions have successfully formed, and most of those still face the often-arduous process of negotiating contracts with employers. Pandemic-driven labor shortages gave workers an unusual boost in leverage for a time, but that dynamic could change again as the economy slows down. The tech industry laid off over 120,000 employees in 2022.
The Future of Unions (Gallup Polling)
May 2, 2022 // In short, views of unions do not significantly divide the rich versus the poor, the highly educated versus the less well educated or women versus men. Views of unions are largely a factor of the individual's underlying political and ideological orientation.
US unions see unusually promising moment amid wave of victories
March 16, 2022 // Gebre said the nation’s unions should send far more organizers and money to back the union drives at Starbucks and Amazon. “The rest of the labor movement should be willing to lend a hand,” even if they don’t get any of the members, said Gebre, who was recently named Greenpeace’s chief program officer. “That’s what solidarity means.”