Knowledge Commons
HomeTopicsSeriesAboutGuidesPopularContact

As the Golden Handcuffs Come Undone

What Tech Workers in Silicon Valley Asked For, and What They Got: A Half-Century Balance Sheet

40 min readAuthor: Oğuz Demirkapı
As the Golden Handcuffs Come Undone

As the Golden Handcuffs Come Undone

What Tech Workers in Silicon Valley Asked For, and What They Got: A Half-Century Balance Sheet

Summary

Dear young comrades,

On 11 October the US public broadcaster KQED published a story. Its headline is a question: "Tech workers have long resisted unions. Will AI and politics change the equation?"

The question can look strange. People who work in Silicon Valley earn some of the highest salaries in the world, eat free meals and own shares. Why would anyone there need a union?

This article answers that question. Let us state the result first.

The basic problems fall under seven headings:

  • There is no job security. In 2023 more than 260,000 people were laid off in the technology sector. In 2026 layoffs justified by artificial intelligence hit a record. Employment of entry-level programmers has fallen by 20% since 2024.
  • Control of the work is being taken from the worker. The engineer stops being the person who decides and becomes the person who carries data to the model. How much artificial intelligence each person uses is measured by "token tracking" and written into the performance review.
  • The worker cannot decide where what they produce will be used: the Pentagon's drone project, the Israeli military's cloud, ICE hunting migrants.
  • The workforce has two tiers. In the same building as the staff engineer there is a contract driver, cook, security guard, data labeller and AI rater, working for half the pay.
  • Wages are suppressed in secret. Apple, Google, Intel and Adobe made a hidden agreement not to hire one another's employees. The H-1B visa ties the worker to the employer.
  • Harassment and discrimination happen, and complaints are smothered behind closed doors by forced arbitration.
  • In the games industry there is the endless overtime called "crunch".

What did they want? Roughly three things:

  • Bread: wages, job security, a limit on working hours.
  • A say: in layoffs, in bringing artificial intelligence into the job, in who the product is sold to.
  • Organisation: recognition of the union and a collective agreement.

What did they get? The balance sheet is mixed, but it can be read:

  • What was won. Google's 2018 walkout got forced arbitration removed. The Project Maven contract was not renewed. A union was formed at Kickstarter; the 42-day strike in 2025 wrote a four-day week and a ban on replacing jobs with artificial intelligence into the contract. The first US collective agreement at Microsoft was signed, with a 13.5% rise. The 3,000 to 5,000 contract workers who train Google's search algorithm got a rise. Contract workers in Pittsburgh signed a first agreement with the United Steelworkers. Cafeteria workers and drivers unionised.
  • What was lost. Among directly employed white-collar workers there is not a single company-wide recognised union. The Alphabet Workers Union works without official recognition, with "more than a thousand" members in a company of 190,000. About 50 Google workers who protested the Israel contract were fired. In 2025 more than 200 AI raters who tried to organise were laid off. The unionisation rate in computer and mathematical occupations is still 3.7%.

The real lesson: Lasting gains always came from one of two places: the bottom tier (contract workers, quality assurance, drivers, cooks) or the white-collar workers who saw themselves as workers. The layer that trusted its shares and said "we are privileged" came out of every crisis empty-handed.

Artificial intelligence is putting these two layers on the same ship. The thesis of this article is this: "Good conditions" in the Valley were not a privilege. They were a management technique. When artificial intelligence lowered the cost of that technique, the conditions were taken back. The only lasting security left in the worker's hands is organisation.

Now the details.

The occasion: what does KQED tell?

Ella Jackson's piece is built on a few testimonies.

Joshua Carroll, a product manager at Google, is one of the Bay Area organisers of the Tech Workers Coalition. He says that until 2023 he did not bring politics into work. The breaking point was the use of Google and Amazon technology in Israel's assault on Gaza. He describes his job today like this: they have gone from making product decisions to "shovelling data" into artificial intelligence systems.

Alex Samburov, a Google software engineer, is a member of the Alphabet Workers Union and one of the initiators of the "Googlers Against ICE" campaign. The campaign collected 1,700 signatures against Google's partnerships with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Samburov's point is clear: Google's management answers neither to the user nor to the voter. The greatest lever for changing the company is in the workers' hands.

Jeremy Bernick, a lawyer in Arizona and a member of the CWA (Communications Workers of America), says this: "For the first time since the 1970s and 1980s there is a real fear of being displaced. Unions are a strong answer to that."

The figures in the piece:

  • According to Stanford's 2026 AI Index, employment of entry-level programmers has fallen by 20% since 2024. A third of the organisations surveyed expect further layoffs.
  • According to layoffs.fyi, 2026 is the year in which layoffs were most often tied directly to artificial intelligence. The total number of layoffs was higher in 2023.
  • According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the unionisation rate in computer and mathematical occupations is 3.7%. The average in other sectors is 10%.
  • Wikimedia's white-collar employees decided to unionise in September. At Blizzard a collective agreement was signed with the CWA. In both campaigns, the introduction of artificial intelligence into the job was one of the main concerns.
  • The CWA set up an artificial intelligence advisory committee and published an "AI bargaining guide".

There is also a contrary view. Lenny Siegel, a former mayor of Mountain View, does not expect mass unionisation unless the artificial intelligence bubble bursts. In his view the highly paid worker will prefer individual bargaining. Workers on H-1B visas will not speak up either, for fear of losing their visas.

The piece is a good news story. But it stays journalism: it reports who said what, and it does not ask why the workers think this way. We will ask that question.

What do "good conditions" mean?

First, let us clear away a misconception.

Silicon Valley's good conditions did not appear by themselves. They were designed deliberately. The aim was to keep the union out.

The historian Margaret O'Mara tells KQED this plainly. When Hewlett-Packard was founded in 1939, it developed profit-sharing and the stock option as an alternative to the union. Valley management was "strongly anti-union". The existence of a union was taken as proof of bad management. A sentence attributed to Robert Noyce, one of the founders of Fairchild and a co-founder of Intel, sums up the spirit of the period: "Remaining non-union is an essential for survival for most of our companies."

The stock option did three jobs:

  • Binding. The shares vest over four years. Someone who leaves early loses the portion they have not vested. In the industry this is called the "golden handcuffs".
  • Individualising. Each employee's shares, bonus and rise are bargained separately. Personal bargaining takes the place of the collective agreement.
  • Ideology. As the share price rises, the worker imagines himself a junior partner. The company's interest looks like his interest too.

Marxist writing has a name for this: the labour aristocracy. Lenin used the concept for the upper layer of workers that splits off from the rest of its class by taking a share of monopoly profits. The Valley's staff engineer became one of the purest examples of that layer in the twenty-first century. The privilege was real. But it was a privilege that had been given, not a right that had been won. A privilege that is given can be taken back.

The layoff wave of 2022–2023 showed this clearly for the first time. In January 2023 Google laid off 12,000 people with a single email. Some found out when their badge failed at the card reader. The "Google family" talk ended that day.

The artificial intelligence wave of 2026 shows something else: the engineer's own labour can be substituted too. The material basis of the privilege, the monopoly of knowledge, is wearing away.

Seven basic problems

Before telling the half-century story, let us set the problems out one by one. In every period of the story, a few of them came to the front.

First: job security

The basic principle of US labour law is at-will employment. The employer can dismiss the worker without giving a reason. Without a collective agreement there is no severance pay, and no rule that sets the order of dismissal. The technology sector grew on this legal ground. While the companies were growing, this was not noticed. In a contraction, a mass layoff became as easy as an email.

Second: control of the work

In Labor and Monopoly Capital, written in 1974, Harry Braverman described a process. Capital separates the design of the work (mental labour) from its execution (manual labour). It gathers design in management and breaks execution up, deskilling it. Braverman wrote this for the factory and the office. Today the same thing is happening inside software.

This is what Carroll calls "shovelling data". The engineer no longer makes the product decision. He becomes an intermediate link who prepares input for the model and checks its output. "Token tracking" is the digital equivalent of the factory stopwatch: who uses how much artificial intelligence, who is not "productive enough". We call this mental Taylorism.

Third: use of the product

In the 1844 Manuscripts Marx describes alienation in four dimensions. The first is the worker's alienation from the product of his labour: what he produces does not belong to him, and it returns as a power against him.

The technology worker lives this in a very concrete way. The image-recognition code he writes helps a drone choose a target. The cloud infrastructure he builds stores Palestinians' phone calls. The data platform he develops helps ICE find migrant families. The worker often learns this from the news.

Fourth: a two-tier workforce

At Google, for years, the number of contract and contingent workers exceeded the number of staff. Two separate classes live on the same campus:

  • The staff engineer: a high salary, shares, free food.
  • The cook who prepares that food, the driver who takes the engineer home, the guard who watches the building, the rater who trains the search engine and the chatbot. These people are on another company's payroll, paid by the hour, without shares and without security.

This split is not an accident. It is a management tool. The staff employee's privilege is financed by the cheapness of the lower tier. And the lower tier tells the staff layer, every day, "you are not one of us".

Fifth: hidden wage suppression

The engineer who says "we bargain individually" did not know something. His bosses were bargaining collectively.

Between 2005 and 2009, Apple, Google, Intel, Adobe and other companies made secret agreements not to hire one another's employees. Emails Steve Jobs wrote to Google entered the case file. 64,000 engineers filed a class action. In 2015 the companies agreed to pay $415 million.

The lesson is simple: while the worker was an individual, the boss was organised.

The H-1B visa does the same job by another road. Because the visa is tied to the employer, a foreign engineer who loses his job also puts his right to remain in the country at risk. The $100,000 H-1B fee introduced in 2025 deepened this dependence. Siegel's observation in KQED is right: the worker who holds a visa pays the price of retaliation twice.

Sixth: harassment, discrimination and forced arbitration

For years, employment contracts in the technology sector contained a "forced arbitration" clause. If a worker was harassed or discriminated against, they could not go to court. The complaint was heard in private, before an arbitrator chosen by the company. In 2018, when it emerged that Andy Rubin, the founder of Android, had been sent off with a $90 million package despite harassment allegations, it became plain whom this system served.

Seventh: endless overtime

In the games industry the weeks before a delivery date are called "crunch": 80 to 100 hours a week, often with no overtime pay. In 2004 the spouse of an Electronic Arts employee published a letter signed "EA Spouse" and exposed this order. Overtime lawsuits were filed. But the structure of the industry did not change, and this problem is the core of today's games unions.

A half-century story: what they wanted, what they got

Now we turn to the history. In each period we will look at three things: what the problem was, what was asked for, what was got.

1939–1970: founding the non-union model

Silicon Valley grew on the Cold War defence budget. Military electronics, missile guidance systems, the space programme. HP, with a paternal style of management, built the profit-sharing and share model. IBM, with a similar paternalism, promised its employees a job for life and kept the union out.

There is an exception, and it matters: the telephone industry. Telephone workers in AT&T's Bell system organised from the 1930s. After the great telephone strike of 1947, that organisation became the Communications Workers of America (CWA). Today this is the union under whose roof technology workers organise, from Google to Microsoft, from Kickstarter to games studios. The root of technology unionism is not in the Valley's "new economy". It is in the old telephone exchanges.

  • Problem: Non-unionism was established as a management ideology.
  • Demand: In this period there was no organised demand among white-collar workers. Consent was bought with wages.
  • Gain: The CWA, founded by telephone workers, left an organisational inheritance that would, decades later, be a roof for technology workers.
1970–1990: the factory floor and the poison

The Valley takes its name from the semiconductor, that is, from silicon. Silicon chips were made in clean rooms, and most of the people working in those rooms were not engineers. They were migrant and women workers: Mexican, Filipino, Vietnamese. They worked with heavy chemicals, for low wages, without occupational safety measures.

David Bacon, who worked at National Semiconductor as a technician and a union organiser, describes these factories to KQED as "laboratories for staying non-union". The companies deliberately preferred migrant and women workers, whom they saw as more open to intimidation. Organisers were fired and blacklisted.

In 1975 a Fairchild factory at Shiprock, on Navajo land, was occupied for a week by the American Indian Movement (AIM) against layoffs. Fairchild closed the factory soon afterwards.

In 1981 it emerged that chemicals leaking from Fairchild's San Jose plant had polluted the groundwater. Miscarriages and birth defects in the neighbourhood were debated. The event gave rise to two organisations: the Santa Clara Center for Occupational Safety and Health (SCCOSH), founded in 1978, grew stronger, and in 1982 the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition was founded. Santa Clara County became one of the US counties with the most sites in the federal toxic-waste cleanup programme (Superfund).

Capital's answer to organisation was to move production to Asia.

In 1981 another organisation was founded: Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility. It opposed the Pentagon's Strategic Computing Initiative and Reagan's "Star Wars" programme. It is the first ancestor of today's "no to Maven" and "no to Nimbus" campaigns.

  • Problem: Toxic chemicals, low wages, intimidation of migrant and women workers. On the engineers' side, participation in military projects.
  • Demand: Union recognition, occupational safety, regulation of toxic substances. Among engineers: the right to refuse military projects.
  • Gain: On the factory floor the union was not won, and production moved. In environment and occupational health, local regulations and right-to-know laws were won. This was a victory without a union, but not without organisation.
The 1990s: temps and janitors

In the 1990s two separate struggles ran.

The first was the janitors' struggle. SEIU's Justice for Janitors campaign came to the Valley. It targeted the contract workers who cleaned Apple's buildings. The campaign moved through actions in front of the campus and public pressure, and in time a significant share of the workers cleaning the Valley's large technology buildings gained a union contract.

The second was the struggle of the "permatemps". For years Microsoft employed hundreds of people in "temporary" status, side by side with staff employees, doing the same work. These people could not use the stock-purchase plan or the benefits. The Vizcaino case they filed ended in 2000 with a $97 million settlement. Out of the case, in 1998, came WashTech (the Washington Alliance of Technology Workers), affiliated to the CWA.

With the immigration law that took effect in 1990, the H-1B system settled into place. As software work grew fast, so did the import of labour.

In 2001 the dot-com bubble burst. Hundreds of thousands of technology workers lost their jobs. But no wave of organisation came. Workers lived the crisis as a personal misfortune.

  • Problem: Subcontracting, rights taken away through temporary status, wage pressure through the import of labour.
  • Demand: A union for contract janitors; equal rights with staff employees for temporary workers.
  • Gain: The janitors won a union contract. Microsoft's temporary workers received compensation, and the company had to change the rules on temporary labour. But the 2001 crisis was got through without organisation. Remember that Siegel's expectation, "if the bubble bursts the union will come", did not come true in 2001: a crisis does not give birth to an organisation if the organisation is not there.
The 2000s: overtime lawsuits and secret agreements

The "EA Spouse" letter of 2004 exposed the crunch culture in the games industry. The overtime lawsuits against Electronic Arts ended in settlements, and some employees began to receive overtime pay.

In the same years the secret no-poach agreements we described above were in force.

  • Problem: Unpaid overtime; wages suppressed in secret.
  • Demand: Overtime pay; the freedom to change jobs in conditions of fair competition.
  • Gain: Compensation in the overtime cases; $415 million in the no-poach case. Both were won through the courts, by turning individual cases into a class action. There was no union, and the system did not change.
2014–2017: the lower tier stands up

The Valley's first lasting union gains came not from staff engineers but from the people who served them.

  • In 2014 the shuttle drivers who carried Facebook, Apple, Google and eBay employees joined the Teamsters. Split shifts (three hours in the morning, three hours in the evening, unpaid waiting in between) were the main problem.
  • In 2015 unions such as SEIU, the Teamsters and UNITE HERE, together with community organisations, founded the Silicon Valley Rising coalition. The target was the contract service workers on technology campuses.
  • In 2017 about 500 cafeteria workers at Facebook's Menlo Park campus unionised with UNITE HERE. The same year, security guards organised with SEIU.
  • In 2014 the Tech Workers Coalition was founded in solidarity with these struggles. Its founders were an engineer and a cafeteria worker. This detail matters: the coalition was born from the start with the idea of joining the two tiers.
  • In 2016, after Trump's election, thousands of engineers signed the "Never Again" pledge and refused to build a database that would register Muslims.

One development of this period is the organisation of SEIU-USWW security guards, which we described in The Panopticon's Doorkeeper. The lesson of that piece holds here too: the only action that can actually shut a building is a workers' action.

  • Problem: The low pay of contract service workers, split shifts, the lack of health insurance. These workers were forced to live in cars or garages in the Valley's expensive housing market.
  • Demand: Union recognition, a wage increase, health insurance, a regular shift.
  • Gain: Drivers, cooks and guards unionised and signed collective agreements. In 2019 Google had to require an hourly wage of at least $15 and health insurance for all its contractors. These are the Valley's first real union victories.
2018–2020: revolt from the inside

2018 is a turning point. Directly employed white-collar workers went into the street in numbers for the first time.

Project Maven. This contract between Google and the Pentagon involved developing an artificial intelligence that would distinguish people and objects in drone footage. More than 4,000 Google employees signed the letter saying "Google should not be in the business of war". A dozen employees resigned. In June 2018 Google announced that it would not renew the contract and published its "AI Principles". Those principles included a commitment not to develop weapons.

Dragonfly. It emerged that Google was developing a censored search engine for China. Hundreds of employees protested, and the project was suspended.

The Google Walkout. On 1 November 2018, about 20,000 Google employees walked out in offices around the world. The occasion was the $90 million paid to Andy Rubin. There were five demands:

  • An end to forced arbitration in harassment and discrimination cases
  • An end to inequality of pay and opportunity
  • Public disclosure of harassment reports
  • A safe and anonymous complaint process
  • The chief diversity officer reporting directly to the board, and a worker representative appointed to the board

The result: in February 2019 Google ended forced arbitration for all employees. Facebook, eBay and Airbnb took similar steps. But the demand for a worker representative on the board was refused. Two organisers of the walkout, Meredith Whittaker and Claire Stapleton, later said they had faced retaliation and left the company.

Other companies. Microsoft employees opposed the ICE contract and the HoloLens headset developed for the military. Salesforce employees objected to the CBP contract. On 20 September 2019 thousands of Amazon employees joined the global climate strike and walked out. The day before, on 19 September, Amazon announced its "Climate Pledge", containing a target of being carbon neutral by 2040.

Retaliation. In November 2019 Google fired four employees who questioned the company's relationship with ICE and who were organising. For these workers, known as the "Thanksgiving Four", the NLRB (the US National Labor Relations Board) issued a complaint against the company. In 2018, 14 engineers who had applied to the CWA at the software company Lanetix were fired together. The company settled before the NLRB and had to pay compensation.

The first unions.

  • In 2019, contract workers employed for Google through HCL Technologies in Pittsburgh joined the United Steelworkers. In 2021, 65 workers approved a first three-year agreement.
  • In February 2020 Kickstarter employees unionised by 46 votes to 37. This was the first union formed by directly employed white-collar workers at a major US technology company.
  • The same year a CWA-affiliated union was formed at the software company Glitch. In 2021 the first collective agreement for white-collar workers in the sector was signed.
  • In January 2020 the CWA launched the CODE-CWA campaign to organise technology and games workers.

What was asked for in this period, and what was got:

  • Problem: Military and repressive use of the product, harassment, forced arbitration, lack of transparency.
  • Demand: Cancellation of Maven and Dragonfly, removal of arbitration, worker representation on the board, cancellation of the ICE contracts.
  • Gain: Maven was not renewed, Dragonfly was suspended, forced arbitration ended, Amazon made a climate pledge. These were the most visible victories of the period. But all of them were given by the company's unilateral decision, and none of them was tied to a contract. They could therefore be taken back. And indeed, in February 2025 Google quietly deleted the commitment not to develop weapons from its AI Principles. What had been won seven years earlier was taken back with a web-page update.

The most important lesson of this period is this: a gain that is not written into a contract is not a gain. It is a loan.

2021–2023: institutionalisation and the layoff wave

The Alphabet Workers Union. On 4 January 2021 more than 200 Google employees announced that they had founded the Alphabet Workers Union (AWU), affiliated to the CWA. Membership soon approached 800. The AWU deliberately did not go to an NLRB election. It was founded instead as a "minority union" or a "solidarity union": an organisation that, rather than chasing official recognition and a collective agreement, takes everyone as a member, staff or contract, and runs campaigns.

This model has a logic. On Google's campuses, staff employees and contract workers are on different companies' payrolls. An NLRB election can be held only against a single employer. The AWU gave up recognition in order not to separate the two tiers.

The AWU's concrete gains are also the product of this choice:

  • The 3,000 to 5,000 raters at RaterLabs, part of Appen, who train Google's search algorithm, were working for wages that fell as low as $10 an hour. As a result of the AWU's campaign, in January 2023 wages rose to $14 to $14.50 an hour. A rise of about $10 million in total.
  • Contract workers at YouTube Music, employed through Cognizant, unionised. The NLRB ruled that Google was these workers' "joint employer". The ruling mattered because it legally identified who the real boss is in the contracting chain. But Cognizant soon afterwards ended these workers' contract.

The games industry. In 2022 quality assurance (QA) testers at Raven Software, part of Activision, unionised. While buying Activision Blizzard, Microsoft signed a neutrality agreement with the CWA in June 2022, to make it easier to get the competition authorities' approval: the company would not run a campaign against unionisation. In December 2022 about 300 QA employees at ZeniMax unionised. This was the first union at Microsoft in the United States.

Notice a class detail here: what brought the neutrality agreement was not Microsoft's conscience. It was the need for approval of a monopoly merger. A conflict inside capital opened a door for the worker. The workers went through it.

Other developments. In 2022 the Amazon Labor Union won the union election at the JFK8 warehouse on Staten Island. The first unions were formed at Apple stores in Towson and Oklahoma City. The New York Times's technology employees organised under the NewsGuild and struck on election day in 2024.

The layoff wave. From the end of 2022, mass layoffs swept the sector. Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, Google. In 2023 more than 260,000 technology workers in total lost their jobs. This wave changed white-collar psychology: job security was no longer an abstract idea.

  • Problem: Mass layoffs, the low wages of contract workers, crunch and low QA wages in the games industry.
  • Demand: Consultation and seniority protection in layoffs, a wage increase and joint-employer recognition for contract workers, union recognition in the games industry.
  • Gain: A rise for contract workers, a neutrality agreement and union recognition in the games industry, the first collective agreement at Kickstarter (2022, 59 workers). But against the layoff wave, white-collar workers won no collective security at any company. Where there was no union, the layoffs were done by email.
2024–2025: politics hardens, and the first real contracts

Nimbus and Gaza. In 2021 Google and Amazon had signed the $1.2 billion "Project Nimbus" cloud contract with the Israeli government and military. The No Tech for Apartheid campaign organised against this contract. In April 2024 there were sit-ins at the New York and Sunnyvale offices. Google first fired 28 workers, then more than 20 more. About 50 people in total. Some had not joined the actions. They had only watched.

At Microsoft the No Azure for Apartheid campaign followed a similar path. In 2025, employees who interrupted the company's 50th-anniversary event and held a sit-in at president Brad Smith's office were fired. In September 2025, after investigations by +972 Magazine and the Guardian, Microsoft cut some of the cloud services it provided to Unit 8200 of the Israeli military. In Who Holds the Leash on Artificial Intelligence?, on the rules of conduct for artificial intelligence, we summed it up like this: what stopped a contract was not a company principle. It was the action of the workers who were fired, and the journalists' exposure.

AI raters. The raters who train Google's Gemini chatbot and its search summaries worked through contract firms such as GlobalLogic, owned by Hitachi. A significant share of them held a master's degree or a doctorate. At GlobalLogic they were paid $28 to $32 an hour, and at subcontractors $18 to $22 for the same work. They began to organise against low pay, insecurity, time pressure that rewards speed rather than quality, and a return-to-office mandate. In August 2025 more than 200 raters were laid off. Two workers filed a retaliation complaint with the NLRB. Internal documents showed that GlobalLogic was training artificial intelligence systems to replace these workers.

This case is a summary of the whole story. The worker trains the machine, the machine takes the worker's place, and when the worker organises they are shown the door. This is exactly the process we called "the expropriation of the general intellect" in The Revolt of Crystallized Labor.

The first real contracts. The same period also showed what a contract can win where there is a union:

  • ZeniMax (Microsoft). After two years of negotiation, about 300 QA testers signed Microsoft's first collective agreement in the United States in June 2025. A 13.5% rise for everyone. A prior agreement on the use of artificial intelligence was also added to the contract. There are now more than 2,000 Microsoft games employees under the CWA.
  • World of Warcraft and Blizzard. In 2024 the World of Warcraft developers, about 500 people, formed one of the company's largest unions. Other Blizzard teams followed. According to KQED, Blizzard workers approved a collective agreement with the CWA in 2026.
  • United Videogame Workers-CWA. Founded in March 2025. A sector-wide union, open to individual membership without waiting for a workplace election.
  • Kickstarter's second agreement. The first agreement ended in July 2025. When management dug in on the right to take back the four-day (32-hour) week in place since 2022, and on the pay floor, Kickstarter United (OPEIU Local 153) struck on 2 October 2025. After a 42-day remote strike, these things were won:
    • The four-day week was written into the contract. A temporary return to five days happens only with a reason, advance notice and a time limit.
    • The pay floor was tied to the cost of living. For the lowest-paid workers there was an average rise of 6% and a one-off payment of $6,000.
    • Kickstarter will not be able to replace any position with artificial intelligence. If artificial intelligence changes a job, management has to work on it with the employee.
    • Strong protection against replacing staff employees with contract workers.

The Kickstarter strike is one of the clearest securities won by collective agreement against artificial intelligence in the US technology sector. A small group of workers, at a small company. But what it shows is large: the most concrete security against artificial intelligence came not from a company principle, but from a strike.

The state's stance. In January 2025 the Trump administration removed NLRB member Gwynne Wilcox and for a long time deprived the board of a quorum. The institution that would decide a worker's retaliation complaint was in practice paralysed. An executive order issued in December 2025 limited the states' power to regulate artificial intelligence. As KQED also recalls, the technology sector had lobbied for this order. The $100,000 H-1B fee introduced in September 2025 increased the foreign worker's dependence.

  • Problem: Use of the product in war and in the migration regime, substitution by artificial intelligence, the insecurity of contract raters, the state paralysing the institutions of labour law.
  • Demand: Cancellation of the Nimbus and ICE contracts, union recognition, a ban on substitution by artificial intelligence, a pay floor, a four-day week.
  • Gain: Real contracts where there was a union (ZeniMax, Kickstarter, Blizzard). Microsoft's partial cutting of the Unit 8200 service. Where there was no union, a heavy defeat: Nimbus continues, the protesters were fired, the raters were laid off, the weapons commitment was deleted.
2026: where are we today?

The picture KQED describes is today's cross-section of this half-century story:

  • Layoffs tied to artificial intelligence are at a record level.
  • "Token tracking" and mandatory use of artificial intelligence are spreading.
  • Some employees at Anthropic and Google resigned, worried that their companies would not be able to control artificial intelligence. As we wrote in The Class of a Resignation, resignation is an "exit", not a "voice".
  • Googlers Against ICE reached 1,700 signatures and was supported by the AWU.
  • A decision to unionise was taken at Wikimedia, and a collective agreement was signed at Blizzard.
  • The CWA published its AI bargaining guide.

The balance-sheet table

Let us gather the half-century into one table.

StruggleWhat they wantedWhat they got
Semiconductor factories (1970s–80s)A union, occupational safetyNo union; environmental and occupational-health regulations
Justice for Janitors (1990s)A union for contract janitorsA union contract
Microsoft's temporary workers (1990s)Equal rights with staffA $97 million settlement, a change in the rules
The no-poach case (2010s)An end to hidden wage suppression$415 million in compensation
Drivers, cooks, guards (2014–17)A union, wages, insuranceA union and a contract; a $15 floor
Project Maven (2018)Cancellation of the military contractNot renewed; the principle was deleted in 2025
The Google Walkout (2018)An end to arbitration, worker representation in managementArbitration ended; representation was refused
HCL Pittsburgh (2019–21)A union for contract workersA first three-year agreement
Kickstarter (2020–22)Union recognitionRecognition and a first agreement
Appen raters (2022–23)A wage increaseA rise for 3,000 to 5,000 workers
ZeniMax QA (2022–25)A union, wages, an AI securityMicrosoft's first US agreement, a 13.5% rise
The Nimbus protests (2024)Cancellation of the Israel contractAbout 50 people fired, the contract continues
GlobalLogic raters (2025)Wages, security, the right to organiseMore than 200 people laid off
The Kickstarter strike (2025)A four-day week, a pay floor, an AI securityAll three written into the contract

Read the table carefully. Almost every row that ends in a gain has either a union or a class action. Almost every row that ends in a defeat has no organisation, or an organisation that was not recognised.

Who won, who lost? Four patterns

First pattern: the lower tier won

The Valley's first and most lasting union victories were won by janitors, drivers, cooks, guards and contract testers. The reason is simple: these workers never imagined themselves "partners". They had no shares, and no privilege to lose. They saw themselves as workers, and they organised as workers.

Second pattern: given as a favour, taken back as a favour

Maven was not renewed, and Google published a principle of not developing weapons. Seven years later the principle was deleted. Forced arbitration ended, but worker representation on the board was not given. Everything given by the company's unilateral decision can be taken back by the company's unilateral decision. This is why the contract is the heart of the union: it takes the gain out of the boss's goodwill and turns it into a legal obligation.

Third pattern: a political demand cannot be protected without economic organisation

Carroll's observation in KQED is a summary of this pattern. As layoffs increase, political organisation gets harder, because a worker who is afraid of losing their job cannot talk about Gaza or ICE.

None of the 50 people who acted against Nimbus had job security. The workers at Kickstarter did, and they were able to strike for 42 days.

In the Marxist tradition this is discussed as the relation between the economic and the political struggle. One does not take the other's place. But without economic organisation the political demand hangs in the air. Job security is the material precondition of political speech.

Fourth pattern: crisis alone does not give birth to organisation

In 2001 the dot-com bubble burst, hundreds of thousands of people were left unemployed, and no organisation was born. In 2023, 260,000 people lost their jobs, and mass unionisation did not come. This is the weak point of Siegel's thesis that "if the bubble bursts, the union will come".

A crisis is an opportunity, but only if there is an organised core to meet it. What the Tech Workers Coalition, the AWU and CODE-CWA are doing today is building that core. When the bubble bursts, workers seeing a common struggle rather than a personal misfortune depends on that core existing.

What is artificial intelligence changing?

We can now return to the opening question: why does a worker in good conditions want a union?

The material basis of the privilege is wearing away

The engineer's high wage rested on a monopoly of knowledge: writing code and designing systems was work that few people knew. Artificial intelligence breaks that monopoly by learning from the common labour of millions of programmers (open-source code, forums, documents). But the broken monopoly passes not to the worker, but to the owner of the model.

This is exactly what Marx describes in the "Fragment on Machines" in the Grundrisse: society's general intellect is transferred to the machine and becomes the property of capital. We discussed this process in detail in The Computing Worker's Handbook and in The Tearing of the Illusion.

The reserve army has reached mental labour

The 20% fall in entry-level employment is turning new graduates into a reserve army of labour waiting at the sector's door. Marx's concept of the "industrial reserve army" describes how the unemployed pull down the wages of those who are working. This army is no longer waiting at the factory gate. It is waiting on LinkedIn.

The two tiers board the same ship

This is the most important change. Yesterday the staff engineer and the contract rater lived in different worlds. Today both stand before the same machine. The rater trains the machine and loses the job. The engineer starts shovelling data to the machine and is afraid of losing the job.

The two faces of alienation come together:

  • Alienation from the product: "Where is what I make being used?" (Maven, Nimbus, ICE)
  • Alienation from the process: "How do I do my job, and who is measuring it?" (token tracking, shovelling data)

These two questions come out at a single answer: the decisions are taken on the board, and the worker has no lever left but organisation.

Two languages, two worlds
The company's languageThe class's reply
"We are a family."A family does not show a member the door by email.
"You have shares, so you are a partner too."A partner takes part in the decision to lay people off. Can you?
"Artificial intelligence will empower you."Empowerment means the time that is gained stays with the worker. Who keeps it?
"Individual bargaining is in your favour."Your bosses bargained with you by means of a no-poach agreement.
"A union is a sign of bad management."A union is the sign that good management cannot be left to the employer's favour.
"Don't bring politics into work."Has the person who signs the Pentagon contract not brought politics into work?
"Your token use shows your performance."The stopwatch showed the worker's speed too.
"We have AI principles."A principle that is not written into a contract lasts until the next update.

What the KQED piece leaves out

The story is good, and the facts are right. But it falls short in four places.

The contract tier is invisible. The piece looks only at directly employed white-collar workers. Yet most of the union victories in the Valley were won in the contract tier. The AWU's strength today also comes from organising both tiers at once. Not to tell this tier is to tell half the story.

The bosses' organisation is not mentioned. The narrative that "technology workers preferred individual bargaining" is incomplete if it does not mention that the bosses acted collectively, in secret. The $415 million case is the strongest evidence against that narrative.

Favour is not distinguished from contract. The piece cites Maven as a victory, but it does not mention that Google deleted the weapons commitment in 2025. Yet this is the most instructive turn in the story.

The Kickstarter strike is missing. The most concrete security won by collective agreement against artificial intelligence in the US technology sector was the most direct answer to KQED's question. It does not appear in the piece.

Seen from Turkey

This story is not far from us.

The first obstacle in front of the computing worker in Turkey is legal. Computing is not recognised as a separate branch of industry. Programmers, network specialists, data analysts and content moderators are mostly squeezed into branch 10, "Trade, office, education and fine arts", or scattered across other branches. The 1% branch threshold also makes organisation practically impossible. We told this in detail in The Computing Worker's Handbook.

The second obstacle is ideological, and it is the same as in the Valley: "We are white-collar, a union is not for us." White-collar workers in Turkey may not receive shares, but they live the same individualising, in the language of "career", "performance bonus" and "benefits".

The third obstacle is the two-tier workforce. Here too, a software company's staff engineer and the courier who works through that company's application live in different worlds. But they are the two ends of the same algorithm.

The lessons a computing union can draw from the Valley's half-century of experience are these:

  • Do not separate the contract worker from the staff employee. The AWU's model matters for this. Splitting the two tiers for the sake of recognition weakens the organisation from the start.
  • Turn the favour into a contract. Every improvement the employer gives can be taken back unless it becomes a clause at the bargaining table.
  • Bring artificial intelligence to the table. Kickstarter's "no substitution by artificial intelligence" clause and the CWA's bargaining guide offer concrete examples that can be written into a collective agreement.
  • Carry the political question with economic organisation. "Where is our product being used?" is a question a worker with job security can ask.
  • Do not wait for the crisis. A crisis does not give birth to an organisation if the organisation is not there. The core has to be built today.

Concrete tasks

Dear young comrades, this story was not told so that it could be read and passed over.

  • Read your own employment contract. Is there an arbitration clause? A non-compete? What does the intellectual-property clause cover? You cannot object to what you do not know.
  • See the two tiers at your workplace. Who works in the same building, on the same project, from another company's payroll? Talk to them.
  • Ask how the use of artificial intelligence is measured. Token tracking, screen monitoring, a productivity score. Learn what is measured, where the data is kept, and how it enters the performance review. Our pieces on data protection set out your rights on this.
  • Ask "where is our product being used?" It is your right to know whom you are writing code for.
  • Put the gain in writing. If your employer makes an improvement (remote work, flexible hours, a training budget), ask that it become a written document, and preferably a collective text.
  • Learn the law of organising. Carroll tells KQED that he constantly had to explain to people that retaliation is illegal. In Turkey too, very few computing workers know the legal consequences of dismissal for union activity.
  • Follow the examples in the world. Read the CWA's AI bargaining guide, the Kickstarter agreement, ZeniMax's artificial intelligence agreement. The clauses are ready. There is no need to invent them again.
  • Discuss this article. With your teammates, over a meal. An organisation begins with a conversation.

The handcuffs and the chain

For half a century a pair of golden handcuffs was put on the worker in Silicon Valley. Shares, a bonus, free food, the talk of "family". The handcuffs were made of gold, but they were still handcuffs.

Now artificial intelligence is scraping the gold plate off those handcuffs. What comes out from underneath is the chain Marx and Engels speak of in the Manifesto: the worker has nothing to lose.

Looking at the Valley's history, we see this: the workers got part of what they wanted. They lost part of what they got. What remained in their hands for good was only what they had won with organisation and with a contract. The janitor's union is still there. Kickstarter's four-day week is still there. Google's weapons commitment was deleted.

The half-century balance sheet in one sentence is this: What lasts is the right that was won. A privilege that was given can be taken back.

And a note: none of the winners in this story was a hero. Janitors, drivers, testers, a few dozen Kickstarter employees. Ordinary people. What they had in common was that one day they sat at a table and said "let us do this together".

One day you will sit at that table too.

Sources

The occasion

Wage suppression and no-poach agreements

Contract service workers

The Google Walkout and forced arbitration

Unions of contract technology workers

Kickstarter

The games industry

Nimbus and AI raters

Theoretical frame

  • Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (alienated labour)
  • Karl Marx, Grundrisse, "Fragment on Machines" (general intellect)
  • Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I, Chapter 23 (the industrial reserve army)
  • V. I. Lenin, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (the labour aristocracy)
  • Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital (1974)
  • Margaret O'Mara, The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America (2019)

Our related pieces

This article is published on Knowledge Commons under a CC BY-SA licence. Copy it, change it, publish it.

Topics:Artificial Intelligence and TechnologyLabour and OrganisingWorld and ImperialismUnions
Tags:#union#labour#digitallabour#artificialintelligence#usa#class#computing#turkey

Related Posts

Newsletter