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, Amazon fired Costa and another colleague, Emily Cunningham, after they attempted to organize an online town hall bringing together office employees and warehouse workers endangered by COVID. In 2021, the NLRB sided with the two in an unfair labor practices claim against Amazon.

Costa says they waited as long as possible to file the claim, hoping for a change at the White House. “And that ended up being true, because Biden put more labor-friendly people on the [NLRB], and I could see that weakening [under Trump], definitely,” she says.

In 2021, Costa took a job as a principal design lead at Microsoft, where she continued her environmental advocacy with her new employer until her layoff in 2023. She’s far from alone. The site Layoffs.fyi counts 149,690 layoffs at 526 tech companies, just in 2024, further eroding elite tech worker leverage at their companies.

Those changes have put more bread-and-butter issues on organizers’ agendas. In addition to traditional layoffs, they are grappling with concerns over labor-replacing artificial intelligence and (for some employees) reluctance to return to the office. “The top areas before the election were around job security,” says McAvinney. “So that, pre elections and continuing post elections, is a pretty big deal for most people.”

What’s more, tech leaders have changed their tone on politics. In 2017, Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and other tech execs spoke out against Trump’s “Muslim ban.” The day after this election, Pichai posted on X, “Congratulations to President @realDonaldTrump on his decisive victory. We are in a golden age of American innovation and are committed to working with his administration to help bring the benefits to everyone.” Similar praise has come from Bezos, Apple’s Tim Cook, Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, and of course Elon Musk.

A new drive to unite forces

The upshot of these setbacks, say Costa and other organizers, is that once-elite employees may find common cause with others, such as Amazon warehouse workers and drivers or Google temp office workers, data center techs, and gig workers who rate search results. “These folks, they’re not trying to get rich, but they just want to be able to provide funds and a dignified lifestyle for their respective families,” says Ryan Brown, a Baptist minister and, until recently, a packer at Amazon’s RDU1 warehouse outside Raleigh, North Carolina. In January 2022, he and other coworkers founded Carolina Amazonians United for Solidarity & Empowerment (CAUSE) with the goal of organizing Amazon drivers and warehouse workers in North and South Carolina. (Brown was terminated from his position on December 3. In an email to Fast Company, Amazon spokesperson Eileen Hards wrote, “Mr. Brown was terminated for repeated misconduct that included making derogatory and racists comments to his co-workers.” Amazon maintains the firing was not retaliation for his organizing efforts.)

“We still have a lot of organizing to do in the context of educating workers, because a lot of workers out there, they don’t even know the rights that they have,” says Brown. The group is currently collecting worker petitions as the first step towards forming a legally recognized union under the NLRB.

“All of this organizing has been happening kind of in silos,” says Antonio Aguilera, executive director of the Coworker Solidarity Fund. The Fund grew out of a project by one-time Google employee Liz Fong-Jones. The transgender engineer was one of over a dozen employees who came forward with accusations of harassment by coworkers in early 2018. Later that year, she pledged to match up to $100,000 of donations from Google employees for a strike fund.

The organization continues to raise funding for workers on causes ranging from Starbucks labor organizing to supporting Google employees fired after the Project Nimbus protests. It recently passed the $1 million mark in funding disbursed to about 400 workers, says Aguilera.

The Solidarity Fund is now supporting Amazon employees’ efforts. “This is the first time that I see that all of these different workers . . . organizing across the entirety of Amazon workplaces are coming together for a joint effort and that type of mutual aid space, a space for collaboration,” says Aguilera.

Amazon drivers and warehouse workers have led a wide array of efforts. Along with CAUSE in the Carolinas, there are others, such as Amazonians United, which is active in cities such as Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia. The Teamsters have been coordinating with those projects and others, says Randy Korgan, director of the Teamsters Amazon Division. “We’ve been coordinating with every single one of these organizations across the country since the beginning of building capacity,” he says.

In 2022, workers at the JFK8 fulfillment center on Staten Island, New York, became the first Amazon workers to vote to form a union. This year, they became an affiliate of the Teamsters, joining groups in Atlanta; Queens, New York; Skokie, Illinois; and California locations in City of Industry, Palmdale, San Francisco, and Victorville.

These are just the efforts that have gone public. “What goes beyond that is a tremendous amount more,” says Korgan. He declined to provide any more information on how many workers or sites are active.

Alan McAvinney says that there are “roughly 10” unions organizing at Alphabet, not all of them in the open. (That doesn’t count organizing by some non-office employees, such as cafeteria workers.) Efforts are taking place in the U.S. as well as other countries, such as Sweden and the U.K.

The Alphabet Workers Union is a local chapter of the Communications Workers of America. It’s one of about 25 efforts to organize tech workers under a project called Campaign to Organize Digital Employees, or CODE-CWA, which the union says involves over 5,000 workers.

There are also groups organized around causes, including No Tech for Apartheid, which spans Google and Amazon. Another effort, No Azure for Apartheid, is organizing Microsoft workers opposed to offering its cloud services to Israel.

Labor is getting a foothold at Microsoft through partly unionized game makers it’s purchase, like Activision Blizzard and ZeniMax Media. Organizers decline to say how or when all these tech industry unity efforts may come together, but they offer hints. “Each tech company has different ebbs and flows of profit during the year,” says Redwine. In other words, workers will strike when it hits the companies hardest. She gives the example of the New York Times Tech Guild, which walked out on Election Day, throwing a wrench into some of the paper’s online coverage. “Twitter sees a huge bump during major political events or also during the Super Bowl. AWS [Amazon Web Services] has surges that they know throughout the year,” she adds.

“Things are definitely in motion”

Talk of unity is growing. After the election, Amazon Employees For Climate Justice posted a letter on X to their coworkers, saying, “Whether you’re in a red or blue district, whether you’re a corporate worker in a downtown office or a fulfillment center worker at a loading bay, the odds are that you’re worried about your family’s future in this uncertain world.” It invites all Amazon employees to join up and ends with the phrase, “More to come.”

There are similar rumblings at Alphabet. “Things are definitely in motion,” says McAvinney. He declines to say on record what or when, beyond the press release about 2025. “As an organization of a large number of workers, it takes us some time to move and have externally visible results.”

Beyond unity efforts within companies, workers are connecting across the industry. “I recently spent a weekend hanging out with an amazing group of worker activists that are leading and participating in power building activities at tech companies like Apple and Google and Amazon, Microsoft, Uber, and others, in which campaigns may not be as public yet,” says Aguilera. He’s describing the first annual Circuit Breakers conference, held in San Francisco in October. Over 250 people attended, according to organizers from the Tech Workers Coalition and Collective Action in Tech.

Organizers decline to say how or when all these tech industry unity efforts may come together. But Costa hopes for an overarching effort to unite workers who often move between tech giants. “It would be great to have people still be able to connect,” she says. “I suppose it’s like the actors in SAG-AFTRA. No matter where you are, you are part of this union, no matter where you go.”