The Tech Industry’s Greatest Disruptor Is Its Own Workers. Here’s Why They Need Our Support.
If you work in tech, join a union this weekend.
Technology is a great disruptor of industry. It brings many benefits, better services and lower prices. But it has a long history of enabling exploitation of workers. In late 18th century Britain, the Industrial Revolution brought about increased productivity in agriculture and textiles, but failed to bring higher wages or better conditions for field and factory workers. This gave rise to the first trade unions, a band of ordinary workers coming together to protect themselves and others against unsafe working conditions, excessive working hours and to advocate for better pay. Employers and governments were keen to suppress this people power, but trade unions grew to become a powerful and organised defender of workers rights, spreading first through the Commonwealth, the USA and globally.
Without trade unions, we’d all still be working for the company store.
Trade unions became an important line of defence for workers i.e most people, and therefore a threat. In the 1930s, trade unions in Germany were one of the first groups targeted by the Nazis in an effort to weaken and remove opposition. Unions were banned and trade unionists were abducted, imprisoned and killed.
The famous confessional “First They Came…” by Martin Niemöller reflects this,
“First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.”
In the aftermath of World War II the United Nations adopted The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, elevating the rights and freedoms that had been thoroughly trampled and enshrining them into international human rights law. This includes the right to form and join a trade union.
The right is now enshrined in labour laws around the world. Trade union membership is even considered a “special category” under data protection law, along with race, sexual orientation, political opinions and religious beliefs. The rationale is that this kind of information is sensitive and requires extra protection because it could expose people to discrimination and human rights violations if in the wrong hands. See above.
It turns out that regimes persecuting people on the basis of race, religion or sexual orientation also persecute trade unionists. Suppression of trade unions is a red flag for democracy, witnessed from Bangladesh to Belarus.
In March 2025, the Trump administration issued an Executive Order to end collective bargaining (negotiations between employers and unions on employment) for federal employees, an attempt to strangle the unions. This is of course against a backdrop of mass firings from, and dismantling of, federal agencies in the USA. But the unions aren’t having it and are suing the government (the employer) to block these actions.
While trade unions are an established part of many industries and sectors, this is all new to Big Tech. Over the past decade or so, Big Tech companies have gone out of their way to prevent workers from unionising. And workers are pushing back hard.
I encourage readers to look up Christian Smalls, an Amazon warehouse worker from Staten Island, New York, who was fired for organising a protest against working conditions during the pandemic in 2020. Workers at this warehouse had been trying to unionise since 2018, but the firing of Smalls was getting bad press. A leaked memo from an internal meeting of Amazon leadership reportedly reveals a discussion around a PR strategy to make Christian Smalls the face of the movement because, “he’s not smart, or articulate.” This provided all the motivation he needed, and two years later Christain could claim victory for the Amazon Labor Union, making the Staten Island warehouse Amazon’s first unionised workplace in the USA.
Other warehouses reached out to the Amazon Labor Union for help organising themselves and the battle to unionise rages on, from Coventry to Canada. According to the International Trade Union Confederation, Amazon responded to the creation of its first unionised workforce in Canada by closing all 7 Quebec warehouses in early 2025, resulting in around 2,000 job losses. Remember, forming and joining a trade union is an actual human right.
Working for the algorithm
However, as most labour laws apply only to employees of a company, tech companies are skirting responsibilities by classifying workers as independent contractors. Known as ‘gig workers’ and working in warehouses, for ride-hailing apps or food delivery, they work long hours for little pay and insecure working conditions. Platforms such as Uber and Deliveroo exert significant control over wages and conditions as workers are allocated jobs, get paid and get fired via an app. As they are essentially “working for an algorithm” and have rare contact with a human, there is little transparency or avenues to appeal decisions.
The Gig Trap, an incredible report by Human Rights Watch, details a labour model for platform work that traps people in poverty. Although focused on the USA, this is visible in the UK too; the existence of a camp of homeless Deliveroo drivers in Bristol was revealed in 2024.
Insecure employment makes it difficult to organise. But traditional labour unions are rallying behind gig workers, and they are winning. One Italian court ruled in 2021 that Deliveroo’s algorithm was “discriminatory” in the way drivers are offered delivery slots. Cases in Amsterdam in 2023 against ride-sharing apps Uber and Ola contested the use of “robo-firing”, where drivers were fired by an algorithm and often didn’t know why.
The human cost of internet safety
Outside of Europe and the USA, people working as online content moderators or labelling content to train AI models are facing huge problems.
Hundreds of millions of videos and photos are uploaded each day and platforms are constantly fighting fires to prevent the worst of the worst content- violence, murder, child abuse- from appearing on the platforms. Yes, people post these things, a lot. Automation catches some of it, but machines can’t catch context. Is that video of a beheading drawing attention to human rights abuses, or being used as a terrorist recruitment video?
As a safeguard against automated overblocking, content is flagged to a human moderator to review and make a decision before it is allowed on a social media platform. This work is often outsourced to companies in Africa, hiring people on very low pay to carry out this harrowing work under challenging conditions. Not only are people asked to make accurate decisions with menial training or support, they also view hundreds of hours of violent and extreme content, often leaving them with long lasting trauma and PTSD.
Daniel Motaung is one of these people. He worked for Sama, a company in Kenya to which Meta outsourced a bulk of content moderation; he is now the face of a lawsuit against Meta and Sama for unfair dismissal. He was fired, along with around 100 other content moderators, after trying to unionise to improve working conditions. Supported by Foxglove Legal in the UK, the organisation also supporting Amazon workers in Coventry to unionise, the trial is currently underway. As a result Meta moved their outsourced content moderating from to Kenya to Ghana, where reportedly the working conditions are the same if not worse. Quietly, content moderators formed the African Content Moderators Union in 2023 and last month saw the launch of the Global Trade Union Alliance of Content Moderators (GTUACM) in Nairobi, backed by the UNI Global Union, which supports workers in over 150 countries.
A Time investigation in 2023 revealed the same outsourcing company, Sama, also hired Kenyans to label content in training datasets for AI models developed by OpenAI. Products like ChatGPT are trained on words scraped from the internet. The internet, as previously mentioned, contains a lot of bad things, and early versions of ChatGPT was prone to peppering responses with sexist and racist language. To purge this language from training data, humans would have to go through and label toxic language so that it could be filtered out. AI data labellers described to Time being paid $2 per hour to read graphic descriptions of torture, abuse and murder, leaving them traumatised.
These investigations reveal the hidden work that goes into making the internet a less toxic place and what a heavy burden it is. These workers are incredibly vulnerable, low paid in insecure employment with harsh conditions. They have so little power and yet are pushing back.
Tech workers, unite!
So what about the tech workers at the top of the food chain? The engineers, developers and leaders?
They likely don’t need better pay, or even better working conditions. But there are encouraging signs of staff in higher paid and relatively secure jobs challenging decisions of the tech companies they work for on the basis of ethics, nonetheless putting themselves in the firing line.
In 2018, during the first Trump administration, workers at Microsoft protested internally about the company’s contract with border control agency ICE, which at the time was pursuing the Trump policy of separating immigrant families at the border. Away from the warehouses, Amazon employees in the USA protested the sale of facial recognition technology to law enforcement in the wake of the killing of George Floyd and the rise of Black Lives Matter; in response Amazon announced a 1 year pause on the sale.
In 2025, Google came under criticism for dropping a pledge not to develop AI technologies that cause harm, including weapons and surveillance. Just last month, according to the Financial Times, staff at Google’s DeepMind in the UK are seeking to challenge the decision to sell AI defence technologies to the Israeli government by joining the Communication Workers Union.
Workers across the tech sector are calling out the worst of the industry and demanding better, often at great cost to themselves and their livelihoods. All of these efforts are chipping away at a mightily unfair and broken system, one that the governments really needs to step into. But we know in the UK, the government’s relationship with both trade unions and tech companies is complex.
I grew up in Thatcher’s Britain in the north east of England in the aftermath of the miner’s strikes. As a rebellious teenager in the 90’s I briefly displayed a “Sack Major Not The Miners” poster in my bedroom window. I didn’t understand the politics of it but I did understand that whole towns were about to lose their livelihoods without an alternative in sight. Why wouldn’t you fight against that?
Unions still get people out on the street. I have seen trade unions show up time and time again in defense of others- at anti-war marches, student fees protests, and Pride.
Unions are an avenue to pushing back against the worst corporate excesses and so much of the tech industry is not great and about to get worse. Workers rights are the backbone of the tech industry, they need to be protected like other industries.
Perhaps recognising that the tech industry needs better representation, established unions in the UK like the Communication Workers Union and Prospect have launched new sections focused on tech workers. So if you work in tech, in whatever capacity, join a union this weekend. When so much is unpredictable and uncertain, the history of unions demonstrate they can be a resilient and effective defense as technology marches on. We all need some of that right now.
Have a lovely weekend.
(Wikipedia has a good page on global and national tech unions here.)