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By Audrey Hingle —

Who Is Organizing the Tech Workforce?

Who Is Organizing the Tech Workforce?
Photo by Morgan Richardson / Unsplash

A few weeks ago in the IX community, we were talking about the tech workforce, particularly in light of recent mass layoffs and protests over Big Tech’s role in supporting Israel’s occupation of Gaza. There was a time when employees at the world’s most powerful tech companies could influence major decisions about ethics, government contracts, and product development. But those ties seemed weaker now. Why?

So we asked some of those workers to share their story.

In our main story today: the answer we got from a group of workers organizing with No Tech for Apartheid.

But first...

Mallory Knodel Joins Yerevan Dialogue

IX's Mallory Knodel attended the second edition of the Yerevan Dialogue, held May 26–27, 2025 in partnership with Armenia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Taking place in Yerevan, a regional leader for internet freedom in the South Caucasus, the event focused on the theme Navigating the Unknown, exploring shifting geopolitics, peace and security, AI politics, connectivity, and trade.

Mallory spoke on the panel Deep Dive Into the Unknown: Exploring the Depths of Artificial Intelligence and also contributed to a Freedom Online Coalition side event on Digital Public Infrastructure and Human Rights.

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The Myth of a Progressive Silicon Valley

By workers organizing with No Tech for Apartheid

Silicon Valley used to be progressive. At least, that’s what the tech oligarchy would like us to think. During the industry’s ascent, Big Tech execs like Sheryl Sandberg encouraged people to “bring your authentic self to work,” and Google prided itself on its since-discarded motto: “Don’t be evil.” Tech workers with a conscience looking to build for good felt empowered to influence company policies by organizing petitions and walkouts.

But the days when billionaire tech executives feigned to care for their workers are long gone. Silicon Valley’s pivot from “woke identity politics” to realpolitik was on full display at President Trump’s inauguration, where top executives from Google, Amazon, Meta, and Apple were in prominent attendance. Despite Google cofounder Sergey Brin and CEO Sundar Pichai attending and speaking at employee-organized walkouts in protest of anti-immigration executive orders during Trump’s first presidency in 2017, eight years later, we watched Google donate $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund, joining other companies hoping for a more favorable regulatory regime. Among them fossil fuel giants, crypto firms and a vaping industry trade group. Is this a departure from Big Tech’s “progressive values”—or simply a revelation of what has always been true?

Tech's Increasing Retaliation

Some of us have become all too familiar with Silicon Valley’s real political alliances. We bore the brunt of them. In April 2024, Google workers organizing with No Tech for Apartheid (NOTA) staged sit-ins at company offices to protest how our labor was being used to support the genocide in Gaza, to demand an end to the harassment and discrimination of our Palestinian, Muslim, and Arab colleagues, and to demand executives address the workplace health and safety crisis caused by Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion contract that provides cloud computing services and AI tools to the Israeli military and government. In response, Google illegally fired 50 of their workers in what amounted to mass retaliation—including many who had not participated directly in the protest.

Deepening Military Ties

In the year since this prominent display of direct, collective worker action, Google has only deepened its commitment to military contracting. Three months ago, in order to take advantage of the federal contracts available via the U.S. Department of Defense, Google abandoned its pledge not to build AI for weapons or surveillance. In the months since, Google has acquired Israeli cloud security start-up Wiz for $32 billion, pursued partnerships with U.S. Customs and Border Patrol to update towers by Israeli war contractor Elbit Systems with AI at the U.S.-Mexico border, launched an AI partnership with the largest war profiteer in the world, Lockheed Martin, and announced a Google Cloud collaboration with the tech defense contracting company Palantir (whose focus includes “making America more lethal”).

Why the Shift?

Companies like Google and Microsoft have always viewed workers as means to achieve capital and favorable stock prices for their shareholders rather than living and breathing humans whose time, effort, and humanity shape the fabric of the company. This has revealed itself slowly through quiet, media-suppressed retaliation against dissenting workers, then rapidly with yearly mass layoffs of thousands of employees at the behest of shareholder and investor interest even when market conditions didn’t justify such job losses. What may have mattered to these companies in the past—a positive PR campaign, user satisfaction in their products—were only pursued to the extent that they improved shareholder perception and boosted the stock price.

So why the shift? Big tech has revealed the hand they were always playing with, as well as its cost: leadership answers to shareholders and investors. If investors are influenced more by the prospect of holding a definitive stake in the defense industry, in being crowned the winner of cloud infrastructure as well as of the AI race—which has now become synonymous with the global arms race—than they care about the voice of workers, or even the violation of basic human dignities, then tech leadership will always fall in line.

Big tech oligarchs have assessed the risk and made the move to be more transparent about their allegiance to the fascist state. This alignment between billionaire capitalists and state power is a defining marker of imperialism. With the job market difficult for engineers, workers are more easily scared into keeping their heads down even as their employers become transparent about their immorality. However, it’s critical to note that these are ripe conditions to organize mass movements in. Through political education, the high-income working class must come to terms with the fact that they are disposable to capitalism, and wield collective power to turn these conditions around. When workers can become active agents in the structure of the corporation, the structure of the corporation becomes theirs, and they are able to do with it what they are willing. As long as workers do not make this shift, capitalist broligarchs will continue deepening their ties to self-destructive capitalist systems and enactingviolence on class-oppressed and marginalized people.

Organizing Against Oppression

We, the workers organizing with No Tech for Apartheid, understand that we are living in a time shaped by a tech oligarchy that wields unprecedented technological, political, and capitalist power. In the past, Google was careful to protect its public image, and negative press could serve as a check on its actions. But today,  legacy media outlets manufacture consent for the genocide of Palestinians, making “bad press” a far less effective tool.

Tech corporations like Google feel less pressure to respond to public backlash when their reward comes from securing partnerships with dominant, oppressive powers. No Tech for Apartheid centers our labor organizing on Palestine––it is our refusal to build technology to facilitate apartheid and genocide that draws clear lines of resistance against contracts with the U.S. Department of Defense, Customs and Border Patrol, Lockheed Martin, Palantir, and the UAE. Moreover, normalizing tech labor in service of necropolitical power sets the stage for worsening workplace conditions, such as the end of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives, and persistent mass layoffs.

In fact, a closer look at this moment reveals that tech giants have undermined collective power since the industry’s inception: union busting tactics, emphasis on exclusionary and classist prestige, and atomized, multi-tier labor forces have all been designed to keep us, as workers, from developing coalitions and building community. As Big Tech’s strategies repeatedly fail to prevent worker organizing, these companies increasingly resort to repressive tactics to silence, intimidate, and repress workers of conscience, especially when those same workers threaten what they value most: endless, free flowing capital.

In "No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the Gilded Age" Jane McElevey writes:

 “In the organizing approach, specific injustice and outrage are the immediate motivation, but the primary goal is to transfer power from the elite to the majority, from the 1 percent to the 99 percent... [organizing] relies on mass negotiations to win, rather than the closed-door deal making typical of both advocacy and mobilizing. Ordinary people help make the power analysis, design the strategy, and achieve the outcome. They are essential and they know it.”

No Tech for Apartheid is organizing a mass movement of workers prepared to demand just, ethical work and care for the common good in our workplaces, and who are prepared to withhold our labor through collective power if our demands are not met.

This is what guides our strategy: a focus on deep base-building by talking to fellow workers in one-on-one conversations and through tabling at our workplaces. We listen to their concerns, and make them our own, knowing that we are driven by the same collective struggle. We are building a movement that steps off the feeds of social media and into the spaces where our labor takes place.

Reclaiming Our Collective Power

We must reclaim our shared agency united as workers, and in doing so remind ourselves that our labor is not only our power––but also our responsibility. Tech workers must resist complicity.

We invite all tech workers to join our cause: to remain steadfast in the belief of a world where workers are liberated from oppression. Building trust among the masses begins with each of us, as we strengthen our ties to one another in meaningful, lasting ways. Organizing is simply about building genuine relationships through which we can build collective action. The next time you speak to your coworkers, have a vulnerable conversation about the world. Ask them what they care about in the workplace, and ask yourself how you can show them the ways it connects to a shared struggle.

This is how we resist the rise of the techno-fascist state, and reclaim what is ours: our time, our creativity, and our labor, in solidarity with those who have much to lose, and the world to gain: like farmworkers and migrants organizing under the thumb of the U.S. detention-deportation machine, and our Palestinian siblings and martyrs united in the struggle for liberation.

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