Tech Workers Are Unionizing: Collective Actions Tripled Since 2019
From coffee shops to newsrooms and well beyond, the US seems to be entering another heyday for organized labor. One area that hasn't traditionally experienced much union activity is the tech industry—but that's changing.
According to data assembled by Collective Action in Tech that's further quantified in the chart below from Statista, tech workers lifted a lot more fists starting in 2019. The number of actions in that year was more than for the previous four years combined, and it went up again in 2020, dipping only slightly in 2021.
Note that the numbers are for all types of union efforts, not just for new unions actually launching: The efforts include doing or threatening to do walkouts, strikes, and protests, as well as votes to organize—or even simply circulating petitions or writing open letters. Collective Action in Tech documented 481 actions, as of this writing, going back to 2015. But 352 of them happened in the past three years.
The list is not limited to the US—a few of the actions listed for 2021 included work stoppages against the British delivery platform Deliveroo; same for Gorillas in Berlin, Germany; and in South Africa, drivers filed a class-action suit against Uber.
The site lists only five actions for 2022 thus far, all from January, including actions at Activision Blizzard Studios, Facebook/WhatsApp, and Google Fiber. So it doesn't yet include the history-making vote to organize at an Amazon warehouse, which took place on Staten Island on April 3. Another vote a different Amazon warehouse on Staten Island is coming up on April 25.
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