Employee activism is alive in tech, but stops short of organizing unions

SAN FRANCISCO » In February, about a dozen employees at a small Oakland-based technology company called NPM embarked on an effort that is often frowned upon at startups: trying to unionize.

For more than three months, the workers had battled the company’s new management over their hours, a changing workplace culture and diversity issues, said seven current and former NPM employees. So to give themselves more say, they moved to organize. The employees contacted labor groups, including the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers and the Tech Workers Coalition, to hold unionization discussions.

“We wanted the leverage to negotiate for things that were important to us as workers, rather than having them told to us,” said Graham Carlson, who was a content marketing manager at NPM, which provides tools to web developers. “We felt the best way to address it was to address it collectively.”

Three weeks after the workers began organizing, NPM laid off Carlson and four other employees, all but one of whom had been involved in the unionizing. After some of those employees filed a formal charge with the National Labor Relations Board, the federal agency that oversees such complaints, NPM settled with the workers in June. No union has been formed.

“We did not interfere with any of our employees’ efforts to unionize,” NPM’S chief executive, Bryan Bogensberger, said in a statement.

Tech workers at Silicon Valley’s largest companies have engaged in an unusual degree

of activism over the past few years — and it has gotten results. At Google, employees have written letters and signed petitions to force their leaders to address issues such as how artificial intelligence is used in products. In November, 20,000 Google employees staged a walkout to protest the firm’s handling of sexual harassment, leading to new company policies. Workers at Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft and Salesforce have also pushed for various changes.

But the failed unionization effort at NPM shows the obstacles to employee activism in the tech industry, and how moving from speaking out for change to collective bargaining so far remains a distant prospect.

The difficulties are echoed at other tech companies where recent moves to set up unions have also stalled.

At Kickstarter, the crowdfunding site, a unionization effort this year has floundered as organizers struggle to build support. Last year at Lanetix, a logistics software company, more than a dozen engineers were fired after trying to create a union, according to a complaint issued by the NLRB.

A representative from Kickstarter’s organizing campaign said it was “continuing to do the hard work of building a union.” David Gallagher, a Kickstarter spokesman, said its executives had told staff that “Kickstarter is better positioned to overcome its challenges, serve its mission, and do right by its employees and community without the framework of a union.” He added that the company was “in no way seeking to impair the rights of staff members to organize.”

Lanetix’s former chief executive and the company, which has since rebranded as Winmore, did not respond to requests for comment.

Labor advocates said there

were limits to how much tech workers could achieve without actually unionizing.

“You can have this magical moment — the Google walkout was inspiring for all of us — but there’s a question of sustainability,” said Liz Shuler, secretary-treasurer of the AFL-CIO.

But tech workers who aim to unionize face challenges. Many employees see their bosses as friendly peers rather than authority figures and are reluctant to mobilize against them. In other cases, highly compensated engineers may see themselves as independent operators who have plenty of leverage on their own and thus do not need to join a union effort.

“They think of themselves as white-collar labor; they think of themselves as people with money,” said CJ Silverio, former chief technology officer of NPM who left the company last year and was not involved in the recent organizing effort. “They don’t see that collective bargaining will get them something.”