Google employees staged a walkout in San Francisco in 2018 over sexual misconduct allegations against executives.
Credit: Eric Risberg/ AP
Among Silicon Valley executives, Wesley McEnany could be public enemy number one. The healthcare union veteran has been slowly convincing workers at the most valuable companies in the world to form a union.
McEnany works for the Campaign to Organise Digital Employees (Code), a group established in 2020, and has been busy virtually meeting with workers with the help of video game engineer Emma Kinema. Last year, a legal consultancy firm warned tech executives the pair may be cornering their employees.
“[They were] warning technology companies that we were organising all over the place,” McEnany says. “They said we were going to talk to workers really aggressively and push a union to create more transparency, more fairness, and a voice for the job – which, of course, was completely true.”
The pair are having some success. They helped set up a union at Google, which was unveiled last week and has since attracted 700 members despite the business hiring union-busting firm IRI Consultants in 2019 to deal with employee unrest.
Google has yet to speak to those behind the union, although Kara Silverstein, the internet giant’s head of HR, has said “of course our employees have protected labour rights that we support”, and that “as we’ve always done, we’ll continue engaging directly with all our employees”.
Silicon Valley workers have been pushing harder in recent years to have more say in how their employees use their labour
Credit: STEPHEN LAM/ REUTERS
Unionising may seem at odds with the culture companies such as Google, Apple, Facebook, Netflix and Twitter have strived to create. The tech giants have become almost mythical capitalist playgrounds where innovation and creativity trump hours clocked in. Career progression, along with perks such as three organic, sustainably sourced meals a day, good childcare, and paternity and maternity leave, have made jobs competitive.
Senior software engineer JP Sugarbroad, whose job attracts an estimated average salary of $207,000 (£151,000), says, for him, the turning point was the dismissal of the Thanksgiving Four. In 2019, Google fired four workers who organised demonstrations outside its offices, claiming they had breached data and employee security.
“I was really upset,” he says. “This wasn’t the company that I wanted to work for, and when I started looking for it, I realised there were other people who felt like me. I don’t believe the executives are cackling and rubbing their hands in glee but they suffer from the incentive-based model of share ownership.
“The point of joining the union is to accept that it is in my interest to make sure my co-workers are safe.”
Big Tech’s manpower
For tech staff, who as McEnany points out are “some of the highest-paid workers in the country”, wages and benefits aren’t their primary grievance. Instead, concerns centre around the ethical use of their labour, and transparency over where code is going. Google programmers who might be opposed to war, for example, do not want the systems they create to be used by the military by way of a cloud hosting contract, without their knowledge.
Workers have also become more aware of the hierarchical structure among companies which often use contractors to help plug the talent gaps. Often, these workers are doing the same job but have fewer perks, and less pay and leave. In the US, this can mean access to health insurance or time off can be tough.
In Britain, where worker rights are more entrenched and trade unions in a long decline, tech unionisation appears to be happening at a slower pace. Still, there has been growing tension over policy decisions at tech firms.
For years, white-collar workers at Amazon have been showing signs of resistance, signing letters on climate action, and pushing back against its AWS Rekognition tool – a facial recognition surveillance system used by the police. “All the campaigns were initiated in the US but received signatures from employees in the UK,” says one company insider.
Kathryn Spiers was a worker for Google who claimed she was fired for telling staff what their rights were
Credit: Kathryn Spiers
This is starting to translate into unions. Last September, when the Communication Workers Union kicked off a United Tech and Allied Workers branch for tech workers, it attracted several hundred members within the first few days – data scientists and programmers from the likes of Google, Sony and Deliveroo.
Marcus Storm, a union representative, says getting to grips with such a wide spread of issues, from misinformation at social media sites to climate change policies, is something they are still trying to figure out – but “we’ve naturally formed our own sub-groups, which are overlapping”.
Still, pushing for change at global organisations in the UK does present its own challenges. “There are legitimate concerns over, say, if we do something that improves the situation here, they take action here, will the company just move more workers over to their other offices in other countries? I don’t think there’s any clear answer to that now,” Storm says.
Unionisation efforts may still be in their early stages, both here in the UK and in the US, but many are hopeful Google’s push represents the start of something much bigger.
Code’s McEnany says he has worked with marketing agency Blue State to organise its union, as well as Glitch, a New York-based software company. But lawyers at the other big names in technology can expect unions soon.
“We are working with a variety of technology companies, some with significant names and all classic Silicon Valley Big Tech,” he says.
“Google’s union has had a ripple effect. We are hearing from workers who want to do the same thing.”
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