Unions Can Save Tech Workers and Tech Work

Interview by
Aaron Petcoff

A dramatic shift has taken place in the tech industry over the last several years. Industry leaders who once had a reputation as innovative forward thinkers are more familiar as misanthropic paranoiacs. The playful atmosphere of tech offices flush with investment, enjoying luxe catered lunches to attract programming talent, has been replaced by a looming fear that layoffs are just around the corner as artificial intelligence (AI) company executives make repeated public statements that any day now, everyone will be replaced by superintelligent chatbots. The once-sage advice to “learn to code” isn’t heard much these days.

One could hardly be blamed for feeling pessimistic about the tech industry. But last May, 2,100 information technology employees at the University of California (UC) voted to join the union of University Professional and Technical Employees (UPTE-CWA Local 9119). Among the reasons for joining, members have pointed to the layoff protections the union won in its last contract, as well as the positive social vision of technology for which organized workers can fight.

This was the largest effort to organize technology workers in the history of the US labor movement. While the tech industry might still be new ground for unions, the methods it took to win were familiar as ever. Jacobin contributor and tech worker Aaron Petcoff spoke with Local 9119 President Dan Russell and University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Unit Cochair Max Belasco about the campaign, what it took to win, and how workers can organize to build technology that serves people rather than the bosses.

Aaron Petcoff - To begin, could you each tell me about what you do for work and your role relative to the union?
Dan Russell - I’m in IT, so I do desktop support and server administration. I got hired at UC in 2012. I wasn’t represented at the time, and I’d been hoping there would be a union for IT workers at UC; it was one of the reasons I was excited about the job. Then I saw a flyer for UPTE, which was trying to organize IT workers into a new bargaining unit. I came to find out that was not going very well. So I got involved. - My role was added to the unit around 2016, and at that point I got on the executive board and on the bargaining team for the contract fight that started in 2016. I was part of the officer team of a reform slate that got elected in 2018. We ran another leadership slate in 2022.
Max Belasco - I’ve been working at UCLA for fourteen years, since right after I graduated from UCLA. I’m a tech worker too. My title is business systems analyst, but my working title is manager of BruinLearn and clinical IT. - I’m in charge of instructional technology and IT infrastructure at the UCLA School of Law, for our instructional technology and our clinical programs. The School of Law runs several clinics that interface with clients and the public — housing justice, support for veterans navigating social services, and an immigrant family legal clinic that provides wraparound immigration services for families at LAUSD’s Robert F. Kennedy schools. My job is to support these clinics — make sure they have computers, printers, wireless, and access to the databases and tools they need to provide quality legal representation. It’s an important feature of how UCLA engages with the public in LA County. - When the pandemic hit, I pivoted toward developing workshops and helping faculty with varying levels of digital literacy use remote instructional technology. I got credentialed in a lot of that technology through EDUCAUSE, and the work became specialized — instructional design, helping law faculty keep their classes Americans with Disabilities Act–compliant, things like that. - Eventually UCLA wanted to spin that work off into a nonunion title. I was in a union position, and it wanted to roll up what I was doing into a new title and asked me to apply for it, calling it a promotion — but it would take me out of the bargaining unit. So it was a decision: keep progressing in my career, or go back to square one at the help desk. I chose my career, and I’ve been telling people I’ve regretted it ever since — I lost a lot of the contract protections, I lost out on raises that colleagues who stayed union caught up to within a year, and I pay more in health care premiums. - I found that frustration in a lot of other folks too — this two-tier system where some unionized tech workers like Dan benefit from the collective bargaining agreement, but others like us, who have similar specialties and work side-by-side with them, have a much worse tier of benefits and more precarity. That’s not how you build long-term longevity or institutional memory. - The stellar contract UPTE won really motivated us to think about what it would mean for all of us if we didn’t have to worry about the layoffs we keep reading about in the private sector — if we could get raises that keep up with inflation, pay less on health care, and actually have a voice in our workplace. That was a big galvanizing moment: we should come together and join a union that’s shown it’s out there fighting for tech workers.
Aaron Petcoff - I’m curious to learn more about the contract. Max, you’ve already hinted at the layoff protections it secured. What else did the contract win, when was it won, and what’d it take?
Dan Russell - The raises were pretty huge. A lot of folks were left behind by inflation during the pandemic. I think it was 22 percent over three years. Members save up to $300 a month on health insurance premiums. - On layoffs: we got a commitment that before someone is laid off, if there’s a vacant position they’re qualified for, they’d be offered it. And we expanded the existing preferential rehire rights from your own campus to any UC campus. That’s especially appealing for people who can work remotely. It doesn’t matter if you’re at UC San Diego or UC Sacramento. That’s a big thing for tech workers.
Aaron Petcoff - Max, can you talk about how the contract and those protections played into some of your organizing conversations?
Max Belasco - Practically speaking, unionized and nonunion tech workers were treated very differently at UCLA, and I saw it when I was in the bargaining unit. UCLA restructured the main IT unit into what was supposed to be a more dynamic model it called Reimagine IT. Functionally, it recreated the entire org chart and forced everyone to reapply for their jobs. If you weren’t hired, you would essentially be laid off. That was terrifying for a lot of my colleagues. - UPTE won a big victory there. It organized and got the concession that any represented IT worker in UPTE didn’t have to reapply. They got to keep their jobs and placed into the new org chart. But a large number of people still had to reapply. One person I spoke to during this campaign had to interview four times for the job they already had. - When I left the bargaining unit last year, UCLA announced it was going to do another reorganization to bring all the IT units — the law school, central campus, everything — into one thing called One IT. That’s when I started talking with colleagues, and our thought was: When does this stop? Executives, CEOs, and management consultants are making these unilateral decisions about how services should be performed without any input from the people who actually provide them day to day and know how staff, students, and faculty use the technology. - Unionization gave us a way to say: this is a widely unpopular way of dealing with our livelihoods. Many of us came from the private sector and committed to the UC because we believe in its mission. We should be able to have job security and feel secure in our work. That hadn’t been the case at UCLA for a while. - The conversations with colleagues were about what it would mean if, instead of worrying every two or three years about a reorganization and reapplying for our jobs, we had a contract that said, before you could even be considered for a layoff, you’d get a shot at a vacant position anywhere in the UC system. What would it mean to have actual career-progression guidelines, where you could seek promotion in your department instead of hopping around? What would it mean to get steady raises you could plan a life around — to buy a car, move, or start a family? - It was a major shift. It made people think about what an alternative could look like where we’re not just producing more code because we’re scared of losing our jobs but because we feel secure enough to experiment and ask how this actually benefits the end user. The contract is really powerful, but what it led to was even bigger conversations about what our work could be: worker-driven, rather than unilateral control from administration.
Aaron Petcoff - It seems almost inevitable that winning layoff protections expands the unit. It’s such a strong argument for everyone who’s not union to join. Can we go back to what it actually took to win that contract?
Dan Russell - We used a lot of the same models to win the contract fight and this new organizing drive. It’s nothing revolutionary. - It’s organizing-committee models. At each campus, we have a team of respected workers we recruit, figuring out who the organic leaders are. It’s not the Jane McAlevey model exactly, but the model popularized by McAlevey. We bring them together monthly to talk about where we’re at. We started with a survey asking people what they were dealing with and what they wanted, and through our representatives, we had thousands of conversations across the state. - A lot of workers told us the union had never actually asked them what they wanted before. It would just email out a bargaining survey the union came up with. So we used our leaders to ask workers directly, built a bargaining survey from that, took it back out through our leadership structure, put together a contract platform, and asked members to ratify it. - We took that to the table, and after UC didn’t budge, we came back and asked: Is it time to strike? And ultimately, we had to strike five times to get the contract — five shorter strikes over the span of about a year. I think the first strike was December 2024, and we settled in November 2025.
Aaron Petcoff - So this contract fight set these new standards and drew 2,100 new people in.
Max Belasco - I come from a union family, so I look at this contract and think, this is a great deal. But a lot of tech workers don’t have that familiarity. They think there must be a catch. That was the question I got constantly during the contract campaign: What’s the catch? There’s got to be a downside to all of this. - For people that we could actually have an honest conversation with, really talk about what their concerns were, people would sign up. But finding those people was a challenge. When you have 2,100 people, many of whom are remote and may not even come into the office at all, it’s sometimes difficult to identify who we could have those conversations with. So we took what we’d learned from the contract campaign about meeting people where they are and realized we’d just have to have thousands of one-on-one conversations. - We took that up to the extreme of doing home visits. That is, actually going to people’s homes to have a conversation away from management and away from Zoom and any screens. And some of us — even me — were kind of skeptical about whether we’d able to do this. But we hit up every single tech worker’s house in California at least once, and leaders elsewhere visited colleagues nearby. That was a huge driver of participation, because we did the work of literally knocking on doors. - On the last day of the vote, I drove from Santa Monica to Orange County to knock on doors, and when people asked how important it was, I’d say: I drove from Santa Monica to your house right now because I think this is really important. That gesture itself helps people feel like they can have an honest dialogue about the problems in their workplace in a way that’s hard to do over Zoom.
Aaron Petcoff - It’d be easy for someone to kind of focus on the differences between tech workers in the public sector like you all in this unit and tech workers in the private sector across the rest of the industry. But there’s a lot of challenges that are obviously familiar, not just in tech but for anyone organizing a largely remote workplace. There are lots of methods of overcoming those barriers, but I’ve never heard of anyone doing home visits for tech workers.
Dan Russell - The home visits were the last phase. We started by building committees, testing our leaders, and seeing who was willing and able to have the hard conversations (over Zoom, at the worksite, on Slack or Teams). We built campus-based committees and a statewide committee. - Before the home visits, we brought people together for a kickoff convention in the Bay Area to build camaraderie and bring into the strategy. Then we said: We’ve tried everything else — what do people think about home visits? Nobody was dying to knock on doors, because not everyone is happy to see you. But like Max said, once you got in front of people, a lot of them said, “This sounds great; it’s too good to be true. What’s the catch?” Some took a couple of conversations; you’d get four or five nos before a yes. - So a lot of it was building the skills and commitment of the organizing committee. And every time we had a good conversation, we’d ask “Who’s your most respected colleague? Can you set up a meeting?” Everything you can do to use the networks and relationships that already exist is gold. The last thing you want is to drop in on somebody cold. If someone can talk to a person they already trust, you’re half the way there.
Max Belasco - And in California, there’s card check. Under California state law, for a group our size, two things have to happen. You don’t just need a majority saying yes — you need a majority of everyone in the bargaining unit to vote. So with 2,100 people, if only 500 vote and 251 vote yes, it doesn’t matter; you have to win more than 50-percent-plus-one of everyone in the relevant job titles. That’s a higher standard. You can’t win with 30 percent participation. - You could collect cards or survey support, but a controlled vote let us pose it as a clear choice: Do you want these benefits, which you can actually get right now if you vote yes? That made it much easier to talk with colleagues: this isn’t theoretical, this is what we stand to gain by coming together.
Aaron Petcoff - What were the concerns of people you all spoke with who were still hesitant about voting to join the unit?
Max Belasco - A few things came up. The biggest barrier was just convincing people that this could actually be done. I think for a lot of people, there was still the hang-up on the idea that tech workers are not union-friendly. - I also think that while we didn’t see any formal kind of retaliation, there were some people who wondered how the union could affect their relationship with their manager. But often your direct manager isn’t even the source of your pain. They’re dealing with limited resources, structural problems, and decisions that are made higher up. - Another concern was about federal cuts to funding and UC’s budget. If the system is already cash-strapped because of attacks from the federal level, could people get laid off if the union bargained for too much? For me, there’s something touching there, but it also means that UC has created this dynamic where you have people who feel that if they ask for something that they deserve, they’re worried they’re taking it from somebody else. It’s pitting people against each other. - It took deliberate work to talk about the resources UC actually has. The system has $26 billion in emergency funds it can pull at any moment. It’s purchased ten hospitals in the past ten years. The money is available. It’s a question of distribution. I think that it was important for the union to talk about how we make sure that the UC prioritizes funding the services and obligations it has to the public, including making sure that frontline workers and professionals are given the proper money and funding that they need.
Aaron Petcoff - It’s striking how much there is in common between private sector organizing and the experience you all are describing. It’s not uncommon that workers are scared into believing they have to take what they’re offered because a union would force their employer to close down.
Max Belasco - There are real similarities. And this is something that we see as a result of the siege that the public sector has been under now for decades, in which services are either fully privatized or practices are imported from the private sector. - But speaking for myself, I’d like us to be an alternative to what exists in Silicon Valley right now. There’s this myth that the founder is the source of innovation and the rest of us are just here to usher in their product. That’s not why I became a technologist. I believed the story of building something new in a garage that makes people’s lives better. - I really think the public sector gives us an opening to build an alternative model. A lot of us put a lot of our time into developing this technical expertise. We want to have some decision-making power over our jobs. I think through that, we can create a more innovative space where people on the front line have a sense of investment.
Aaron Petcoff - Speaking of Silicon Valley’s vision of the workplace, we should talk about AI. That’s obviously a huge source of anxiety for a lot of workers. Did that come up at all in organizing?
Dan Russell - What I heard was mostly people worried about layoffs in general. IT workers live in constant fear of being laid off, because it feels easy to get rid of an IT worker. - When there are no rules about who you can lay off, the fear of AI becomes, “They’re going to lay me off.” We heard a rumor at Santa Cruz that they’d lay off half the IT department. That didn’t actually happen. But it’s a place that’s seen constant layoffs and reorgs, and people live in that constant fear of being next. AI has just amplified those fears.
Max Belasco - When I got into IT, the idea was that you were learning technical skills that gave you job security. That’s just not the environment anyone’s working in anymore. The venture capital money has dried up, and people see these mass layoffs at Meta and Oracle and think: What’s going to happen at the UC, this public institution? Because what happens in the private sector often informs the public sector, which is always subject to people wanting to cut costs. - So people are concerned about layoffs. It comes down to control. They don’t feel in control of their careers. A lot of people invested time learning these skills and came to UC to use them to help people with a promise of long-term job security, and people are worried that’s going to be betrayed.
Aaron Petcoff - This sense of insecurity isn’t particular to the UC system, of course. We’ve seen in recent primary elections: voters are very favorable to candidates who speak directly to this general feeling of economic insecurity, frustrations over affordability, and the like. AI adds fuel to those fears.
Dan Russell - How do you expect people to react when all these tech bros and boosters are saying this will result in 90 percent of workers losing their jobs? If that’s in the New York Times, people take it seriously, even if it’s total bulls — .
Aaron Petcoff - Did the union put any particular emphasis on AI when reaching out to workers? Did it come up at all as a motivation for joining?
Dan Russell - I don’t know that we put any focus on AI as much as on the need for job security. Looking back, the thing that drove the urgency around job security in our big contract fight was the Big Beautiful Bill: the threat of cuts to public research and public healthcare funding. AI was more of a threat for the IT campaign specifically, but the bigger-picture threat was cuts to public services, research, health care, and education. That made job security one of the big issues, and it grew when Donald Trump’s cuts came into focus while we were already partway through the contract fight. - Fortunately, we already had those things on the table. Our folks on the research and health care sides were asking, are we going to see a 50 percent reduction in UC’s income? UC gets much more of its funding from the federal government than from the state. I believe it’s the biggest or second-biggest recipient of the National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation grants. If not the majority, it’s the plurality of UC’s funding. So that was honestly a bigger threat to job security than AI.
Max Belasco - One of the most motivating things at UCLA was the second reorganization, which was billed as a way to save money and was announced right when UCLA was in the federal government’s crosshairs. With AI, it’s come up and been a concern, but most of my colleagues feel that if AI weren’t there, it would be something else. The real concern, as Dan said, is that our careers and livelihoods are caught in this political jousting between the federal government and the universities. It’s become more incumbent on us to have an organization where we can assert our own concerns, whether about our work or the services we support.
Aaron Petcoff - How do you feel about the general idea of unions in the tech industry at this moment?
Max Belasco - There’s this popular notion that unions haven’t caught on in tech because they stymie innovation or stop us from being creative. But where we are right now, I don’t think anyone would say that new technology is being developed for the betterment of humanity. - In the UC, we have an opportunity to demonstrate an alternative: if you give frontline workers actual say over what they’re doing and let us unlock our creativity by collaborating instead of competing and fearing layoffs, that shows a new dynamic. We can recapture that original vision of innovation: working in a garage with your buds to make something cool that benefits people’s lives. - That’s the reason I wanted to become a tech person. Being in the union is actually the best avenue we have to get back to that, and it’s much more real than what we have right now.
Dan Russell - More than that, technology has made us a lot more productive, and we just haven’t seen enough of the benefits from that. Imagine if we could harness those productivity increases to actually give people the health care they deserve for free, fund research that serves the public interest instead of corporate profits, and provide the education people want. That’s what we should be using technology for: making sure people have what they need. - Once they do, we should be able to work less. That’s what technology should be about, whether you create it or you rely on it for patient care, education, or research. Fundamentally, this is about making sure we control the technology so it serves working people instead of being used just to make the worst people in the world even richer.
Aaron Petcoff - It seems to me that you all are on the front lines in a war against “enshittification.” You’re showing a way out of this world where everything seems to be lazily getting worse and worse.
Dan Russell - Public health care, education, and research will keep getting more expensive and worse at the same time. That’s the trajectory we’re on, and we’ve got to reverse it.