Meet the workers taking on big tech

Bosses are using AI as an excuse to crush worker power. But workers aren't going down without a fight.

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When tech really started to take off in the 1990s, we were told that we were witnessing the rise of a different kind of capitalism. Tech companies claimed to offer high wages, job perks, and progressive social values. Just think of Google’s famous “Don’t be Evil” slogan.

In recent years, this myth has collapsed. These days, the tech companies are very much the bad guys. But one part of the old myth still clings on – the idea that tech jobs are good jobs. As trade unionists at the United Tech and Allied Workers (UTAW) have found, this could not be further from the truth.

“These employers – despite the ping pong tables and nap zones – they’re still employers. They still make redundancies, they still cut pay, they still bully people.”

The AI con: “It doesn’t work”

I spoke to John, an organiser at UTAW (part of the Communication Workers Union), about the challenges their members are facing – and one of the biggest is the threat of AI jobs displacement. But the issue isn’t as simple as its often portrayed.

The tech companies, boosted by credulous voices in the media, have spent years telling us that AI is coming for our jobs. But many firms have found little benefit to implementing their much-vaunted AI strategies. Employers claim it’s because employees aren’t using it right. Employees, including the most technically literate, say it’s because the tech doesn’t work.

“You’ve got non-technical management making these decisions, driven by marketing hype and very deep pockets… and the people actually doing the work are saying: this doesn’t work.”

In practice, AI has become a justification for restructuring. If a business isn’t performing and needs to cut staff, AI is a useful excuse for managers to lay people off without admitting to shareholders that the business is in trouble.

“AI has been a great fig leaf for all kinds of things. Employers are basically taking a punt on what they can get away with… and what sounds good to investors.”

The idea that AI is coming for everyone’s jobs is repeated endlessly by business owners and politicians because it this narrative plays an extremely useful role in a capitalist economy: it weakens workers’ bargaining power. After all, if workers are all scared of losing their jobs to AI they’re not going to fight for better pay or conditions.

“Even if AI isn’t capable of taking everyone’s jobs, it still weakens bargaining power… companies feel like they can say, ‘let’s try downsizing, let’s say it’s AI.’”

But the jobs don’t disappear. They’re simply reassigned to external contractors on lower pay, and with fewer benefits.

“Every single time… you show me those examples, and I’ll show you an outsourcer or contractor who’s hired exactly the same number of people.”

Behind the hype

Nowhere is this clearer than in content moderation – one of the most brutal and least visible forms of labour in the digital economy. UTAW has spent years trying to organise content moderators in the UK as they’ve faced repeated attacks on their pay and conditions from the big tech companies.

“These are people looking at child sexual exploitation, extreme violence… it’s a mad business. A multi-billion-dollar company is making money here but refusing to pay people properly.”

These companies claim they’re cutting wages and removing jobs because they’re able to replace the jobs with AI, but John says this simply isn’t true.

“They’ve very obviously not replaced those jobs with AI. They’ve just offshored them… so they can pay people a third less than what they’ve been paying in London.”

UTAW sees part of its role as following up on claims about jobs being replaced with AI. The union often asks for proof that jobs have really been automated, rather than outsourced.

“Every time we’ve asked for proof – show us the AI that’s replacing these jobs – it never comes. And the media doesn’t look into it either. There’s a lot of client journalism around AI hype.”

We know that narratives about AI jobs replacement are weakening workers’ bargaining power. So, it makes sense that unions should challenge these claims – and empower workers to question them.

“Unions need to be the ones holding these claims to account… hold it up, ridicule it, demand evidence.”

After the bubble: who pays?

Ultimately, John thinks AI is a bubble waiting to burst.

“There’s this whole AI bubble… you see venture capitalists laughing on stage at the World Economic Forum about how it’s all about raising money… banks piling in before IPOs because they know they can get their money out before it collapses.”

Workers inside the industry are not blind to the AI hype. They see that the technology doesn’t work as well as bosses claim, even as its being forced down their throats by management. And they know that they’re the ones who will suffer when it fails.

“When it goes wrong, it’s going to be workers who pay the price – through layoffs, through worse conditions, through outsourcing.”

These workers know they need to organise now to prepare for the chaos coming down the road – and that’s where UTAW comes in.

“We’re seeing more workers come to us saying ‘a few of us have started talking about a union, we want to help.’”

The union is still small, but it’s already having a significant impact.

“We’ve had headline pay rises of 20–30%, we’ve saved people’s jobs, pushed back on return-to-office mandates.”

Often, just the threat of unionisation is often enough to make management listen to workers’ demands.

“As soon as you turn up with a union rep… management go, ‘oh shit, we better play by the rules.’”

“Spending millions on lawyers is nothing to them”

Naturally, the big tech companies are not passively accepting the UTAW’s attempts to organise tech workers. They’re spending vast sums of money trying to defeat the union before it gets off the ground.

“With TikTok, we had majority membership… we were about to win recognition. So one week before the official ballot they announced that almost the entire trust and safety workforce in London were to be made redundant and offshored the jobs to avoid dealing with the union.”

UTAW is a grassroots tech workers union going up against some of the largest and most powerful companies in the world. These firms have almost endless resources – and they’re using these resources to attempt to destroy the nascent tech labour movement.

“We’re not equal parties… spending millions on lawyers is nothing to them. That can delay workplace democracy for a year.”

If these firms are so rich, why not just use these resources to pay workers properly? Because giving in to the union’s demands would set a precedent. Big tech can’t afford to give workers the sense that if they organise, they can win. After all, unionisation doesn’t just threaten corporate profits – it threatens the fundamental imbalance of power between capital and labour that makes capitalism function.

The fight to organise tech is still in its early stages. Union density remains low relative to the size of the workforce. Many workers still aren’t even aware they’re able to join a union like UTAW - which is why their organising is so important (and why you should share this article!)

Taking on big tech

Organisers at UTAW know that building union density in tech is going to take time. But they’re in it for the long haul.

“This is a 20-year project… you’re not just signing people up, you’re changing how they understand their place in the economy.”

The big tech companies think they’re completely unassailable. They think they can exploit workers, destroy the planet, and disseminate technologies causing untold social harm without consequence. After all, who is going to stop them? They’ve captured our governments – and they’re forcing their technologies into so many areas of our lives that it’s become almost impossible to live without them.

In this context, organised workers are the one threat to big tech’s hegemony. If they can fight back in their workplaces, they can prove that these companies aren’t all-powerful monoliths floating above the real economy. Like all corporations, they need labour to survive. And labour can fight back.

Learn more about the UTAW here.