r/technology • u/chrisdh79 • 1d ago
Tech worker movements grow as threats of RTO, AI loom | Advocates say tech workers movements got too big to ignore in 2024. Society
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/12/from-ai-to-rto-unpopular-policies-may-fuel-tech-worker-movements-in-2025/143
u/GooberMcNutly 1d ago
100% the reason for increases in H1-b visas and offshoring.
41
u/AffectionateKey7126 1d ago
There’s always a push to increase H1B visas. Trump was the only candidate in 2016 that didn’t want to greatly expand them on both sides.
44
u/hindusoul 1d ago
His DOGE advisors will have something to say about that.
14
6
u/Lollipopsaurus 16h ago
H1B is a bad program.
0
u/Orionite 12h ago
If H1B holders had a reasonable path to citizenship it would be a better program. As it stands they’re stuck with waiting periods of 10+ years and beholden to their visa sponsors.
7
u/Lollipopsaurus 12h ago
It makes the visa holder effectively their keeper. It's not a healthy business relationship.
85
u/shop16 1d ago
Honestly, even though tech workers tend to be paid well, they should consider unionizing. Some firms expect 60-80hr work weeks as standard operation and there are often not very many opportunities for meaningful pay increases or advancement. At least in the industry I’ve worked in, people only get promotions and good pay increases by leaving and going somewhere else, which is bullshit.
Plus they pull this RTO shit as a way to do big “soft layoffs.”
Id love to see a United Information Technology Workers union in my lifetime ✊
15
u/manuscelerdei 20h ago
The RTO-as-layoffs thing should be dealt with by treating it as constructive dismissal. It's an end run around layoff regulation and everyone knows it.
18
u/guttanzer 1d ago
Counter offers are usually a waste. Statistically speaking it only buys another year.
1
u/Legitimate_Drive_693 19h ago
Yeh because the person accepting the counter offer has a target on his back. That forces them to leave
8
u/KontraEpsilon 18h ago
No, that’s really not it. While I do fight hard to pay people as much as the company can, there are often a few things that happen:
It often isn’t only about the money. It’s a good manager’s job to figure out if it is or isn’t in each circumstance.
The external position they are considering is a promotion and/or something different, and you might not have somewhere to promote them to and something to put them in charge of yet.
Something - often money, but often frustration - got them to look in the first place. When it’s frustration, it’s built to a place where money won’t fix it for more than a year.
A good manager, no matter how big their matrix, needs to figure these things out (and for item 3 get ahead of them). I have pretty low turnover, but when someone does opt to leave I ask them if they are interested in a counter or if they are simply ready to move to their next thing. Often the answer is the latter.
7
u/guttanzer 17h ago
Exactly my experience. The saying “You join a job for the opportunity, you leave it because of the manager” is very true.
People leave because either the pull from outside or the frustration from the inside gets too strong to overcome with mere money. It’s best to keep it light and part on a friendly, helpful note.
6
u/lil-lagomorph 21h ago
as someone working with the UAW to unionize a very big tech/auto company rn, we’re trying. unionizing is a very long haul thing. it takes roughly 5–10 years of concerted effort on behalf of the union itself as well as individual activists in the workplace, which is hard to keep with high turnover, layoffs, employee/location segregation, burnout, etc. it’s not like it’s not happening, but we need all the help we can get from the union(s), workers, government, and public to get there at (or, if very very lucky, before) the 5–10 year mark.
12
u/Chobeat 1d ago
the whole point of the article is that they already unionizing in droves. Many countries already have dedicated tech workers unions, like UTAW in UK, SITT in Romania, or ICT Odbory in Czechia. You can find more here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unionization_in_the_tech_sector
4
u/shop16 1d ago
Yes I know, the movement is growing and globally tech workers have been successful organizing.
I live and work in the US though and here there has not (yet) been as much success in creating a national coalition the likes of UAW or IBEW. The closest is CWA, which is very large, but they are mostly workers in telecom, not software/computer engineering. TWC and TWU1010 don’t have large membership at all, not yet anyway. I’m excited to see these groups gain momentum and broad national membership.
6
u/Chobeat 1d ago
TWC has no membership system because it's not a union, so I wouldn't bundle them with the rest.
CWA and OPEIU have unionized plenty of companies in software development. The CODE campaign is entirely dedicated to it. What you describe was the landscape maybe 5 years ago, but that has changed a lot recently.
2
u/Toomanydamnfandoms 21h ago
Yes this- the big unions don’t really just unionize their own trade anymore, they try to create and support unions all across fields and have had success.
4
u/Toomanydamnfandoms 21h ago edited 21h ago
Don’t discount the large unions like UAW, they help with unionizing all kinds of jobs, not just the job in their name. Trying to build a union from scratch is really difficult especially if your company pulls illegal bs. I work from home in tech and we had UAW help when we were going to try to organize our workplace last year. They can teach you everything you need to know to better pull it off, and can pay for the legal help if your company tries to not recognize the union. Sadly we didn’t make it to card signing as the 3 other union leaders from my work had to leave the company for other reasons with unfortunate timing, two had to take care of hospice parents, another became seriously ill, and those 3 had more power to sway opinions and votes)
9
24
u/mashedPotatoNGravy 19h ago
The article lumps Amazon warehouse workers and Microsoft software engineers together in its discussion of tech worker movements, which seems like an unhelpful comparison. Delivery drivers (which the article also puts under "tech worker movements") are not in the same industry as programmers even if they work at the same company. They don't have comparable labor market, wages, or relation to other tech worker concerns mentioned (RTO, layoffs), so I fail to see why they'd be relevant to tech industry practices
8
u/Chobeat 17h ago
and yet they are organizing together. It's not a matter of perspective or opinion, it's something happening in the real world.
I'm personally a programmer organizing with a collective of riders and we do a lot of actions together.
Also I disagree: they work in the same industry because they are both in the business of making the same platform run, and if they withold their labor, the platform halts. That's the whole premise. Food delivery platforms are probably the space in which this is the most evident, because it's a novel format and the distance between platform worker and office worker is relatively short, at least in some countries like the USA or Germany. Online retail is a close second.
TWC, the org mentioned in the article, was born when Google programmers supported and help win a strike for cafeteria workers.
Class is not a matter of privilege, but a matter of productive relations. You're not an owner? You're a salaried worker? Then you have common interests with the other salaried workers.
1
u/mashedPotatoNGravy 15h ago
That's fair, I wasn't aware that they were organizing together. The article only mentioned delivery drivers in the context of contractor/employee legal distinction, and no other relation as far as I recall
Re: class and privilege, of course workers of any industry getting better treatment is a good thing. But in an article that mainly talks about RTO/layoffs/AI, without the context that programmers are organizing together with drivers etc, and without mention of any other workers movements, it seems unrelated aside from working at the same company
1
u/ProdigalSun1 1h ago
Delivery drivers (which the article also puts under "tech worker movements") are not in the same industry as programmers even if they work at the same company
Workers of all kinds can be in the same industry and organize for better conditions collectively and go on strike together, regardless of job role. Amazon delivery drivers and Amazon programmers who handle e-commerce are 100% in the same industry. There is a long history of industrial unions vs craft unions, see CIO and AFL. The main idea of organizing by industry is that you can organize more of the workers within a company or industry to act collectively, threaten the owners' profits more, and extract larger concessions.
4
u/Tethered_Water 12h ago
Unionizing is probably a good idea with the direction things are headed for tech.
Although it's what I went to school for I pivoted away from the Tech industry a couple years back, and am very thankful I did with the way things seem to be going.
3
u/heavy-minium 19h ago
Where's the movement? What would such a movement even do?
6
u/Chobeat 17h ago
It's in the news every other week now. Have you missed the victory of the strike at the New York Times tech guild? That was just a couple of weeks ago. The tech workers movement is but a branch of a century-old workers movement and the goals are the same: improve conditions for workers, increase collective action, build power for workers and spend it to improve our own workplace, the workplace of our peers and then the world at large.
The workers movement won you the weekend, the tech workers movement will make it 3-days long.
0
u/manuscelerdei 20h ago
Advocates say the thing they're advocating for is too important to ignore. News at 11.
229
u/virtualgravities 1d ago
TLDR:
Study shows RTO mandates result in losing top candidates, high skilled workers, lowers employee morale and increases the likelihood an individual will join some sort of coalition or movement for labor rights.
IN 2025, RTO mandates will cool off. However, companies that do issue RTO mandates in the coming year should be warned that it may add more fuel to the fire from workers to fight back.