Labor unions have been gaining momentum in the U.S. in recent years.
Workers at a Volkswagen factory in Tennessee recently chose to unionize in a landslide election. Union votes at the same factory failed in 2014 and 2019. Today, almost 70 percent of Americans support unions – that’s the highest number since the 1960s.
But Texas is a right to work state, which means that even if a workplace is unionized, employees aren’t required to join. That can make unions hard to fund and maintain.
While you might think of labor unions as a blue-collar thing, enlisting mostly trade and factory workers, a lot of tech workers are forming unions. But some of those workers are finding out their industry comes with some unique challenges.
As the jobs of Texans become more automated and reliant on artificial intelligence, new challenges are popping up for workers and labor movements. New technologies are often aimed at reducing or eliminating the need for human labor, but for some tech workers, the more immediate challenge is their employers’ ownership and management structures. The tech industry’s reliance on the use of subcontractors can contribute to less than ideal work environments.
» A TEXAS STANDARD SPECIAL: The future of work in Texas
Until recently, Katie-Marie Marschner was a worker-organizer for the Alphabet Workers Union. She is part of a group of unionized YouTube Music workers who were laid off in late February.
At the time she was interviewed, Marschner’s time on what’s called “the bench” was coming to an end. She wasn’t directly employed by YouTube’s parent company, Google, but instead worked for a subcontractor called Cognizant. She said the bench is a way that Cognizant keeps workers in a sort of employment limbo.
“This is just a way for them to not give us a severance and let us go on our way,” Marschner said. “So for the last six weeks, we’ve had to clock in and out every day, check our email and be available because they claim they’ll place you in another role within the company.”
Marschner and her colleagues filed for a union election in 2022 and went on strike in February 2023 over a return-to-office mandate. The YouTube Music team went on strike again in September 2023 when Google and Cognizant refused to bargain with them. They believe Google and Cognizant laid them off as retaliation to their union activities. But Google claims it simply chose not to renew the team’s contract.