How Big Tech labor organizers aim to unite for Trump 2.0

Donald Trump’s first electoral victory forever changed the culture inside big tech firms. What had been nascent worker organizing efforts turned into mass movements to protest their companies’ politics, environmental practices, treatment of contract workers, handling of harassment cases, and more. Trump’s return to office can challenge efforts to grow the movement beyond fledgling numbers, but it can also boost the motivation to do so, say organizers. Plans are already afoot, over half a dozen tech activists tell Fast Company, to organize workers around a host of causes and unite different groups within their companies, such as engineers, warehouse workers, and contractors. They are also organizing across tech companies. With some groups still working in secret, the movement may be bigger than it looks. Expect to see more in 2025, organizers say. It remains to be seen if they can rekindle the wave of activism that caught on during Trump’s first term. In 2017 and 2018, thousands of workers at Google and its parent company, Alphabet, signed petitions and staged walkouts to protest Trump’s executive order restricting immigration from majority Muslim countries (which critics labeled the “Muslim ban”) and to scuttled Google’s deals to provide AI to the Pentagon’s drone program and a censored search engine to China. In the most dramatic event, about 20,000 Googlers walked out of work to protest how the company handles sexual abuse claims, among other issues.  In 2019, the group Amazon Employees for Climate Justice (AECJ) collected 8,700 signatures and organized a 3,000-employee walkout to demand the company publish a climate action plan. That activism didn’t end under Biden. In April, Google fired up to 50 employees who staged a sit-in to protest its Project Nimbus cloud services contract with the Israeli government, according to the group No Tech For Apartheid, which organized the action. (Google confirms only that the number was more than the 28 initially reported in the media.) In a statement to Fast Company, Google wrote that, “This work is not directed at highly sensitive, classified, or military workloads relevant to weapons or intelligence services.” It says that the employees were fired for disrupting the workplace and making other employees feel unsafe, though No Tech For Apartheid contests these claims.  Biden has, however, boosted enforcement by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) of federal protections for employees to organize, form and join unions, and arrange for “other mutual aid or protection.” An array of labor law experts expect Trump to fire the NLRB’s very pro-labor general counsel, Jennifer A. Abruzzo. However, Trump has picked pro-union Oregon Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer to head the Department of Labor (which is separate from the NLRB). Now Amazon and Elon Musk’s SpaceX are suing in federal court to have the NLRB ruled unconstitutional. Regardless of how the cases turn out, “It’s likely that the NLRB is going to change [in] how willing it is to help us,” says Alan McAvinney, a software engineer and a leader of the Alphabet Workers Union (AWU).  The day after Trump’s latest election victory, the AWU sent out a press release calling on “tech workers everywhere to get organized and resist Trump’s war on workers in 2025.” “A lot of people are considering things like labor stoppages and strikes as opposed to relying on labor law,” says Clarissa Redwine, who led efforts to unionize workers at Kickstarter in 2020 and holds leadership roles in the Tech Workers Coalition and Collective Action in Tech organizations. The struggle to boost ranks Labor organizers outside tech have racked up big wins. In 2023, SAG-AFTRA performers and the WGA writers union won concessions from Hollywood studios on compensation and restrictions to the use of AI. Last month, Boeing factory workers won a 38% pay increase. Workers in big tech lack the power of numbers. The Alphabet Workers Union has between 1,000 and 2,000 members, according to McAvinney, at a company with about 180,000 employees. “There are things that workers care about . . . that we have won at smaller scales,” says McAvinney, declining to provide details. “But definitely some of the biggest things that we’re interested in winning, we will need to continue to grow as we fight for those things.” Amazon has over 1.5 million employees (plus contractors and temps). Former Amazon user experience designer Maren Costa, who cofounded Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, declines to say how many members the group has. (There are other groups focused on warehouse workers and drivers, several of them still organizing in secret.) Even four years ago, small numbers of high-end employees could have outsized influence. “It was very hard to hire. The more valuable the worker, the more power they have,” says Costa, who is featured in the new Netflix documentary Buy Now: The Shopping Conspiracy. Not everyone was safe. In 2020,