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Employee activism is alive in tech. It stops short of organising unions – Economic Times


By Kate Conger and Noam Scheiber


In February, about a dozen employees at a small technology company called NPM embarked on an effort that is often frowned upon at startups: trying to unionize.

For more than three months, the workers had battled the company’s new management over their hours, a changing workplace culture and diversity issues, said seven current and former NPM employees. So to give themselves more say, they moved to organize. The employees contacted labor groups, including the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers and the Tech Workers Coalition, to hold unionization discussions.

“We wanted the leverage to negotiate for things that were important to us as workers, rather than having them told to us,” said Graham Carlson, who was a content marketing manager at NPM, which provides tools to web developers. “We felt the best way to address it was to address it collectively.”

Three weeks after the workers began organizing, NPM laid off Carlson and four other employees, all but one of whom had been involved in the unionizing. After some of those employees filed a formal charge with the National Labor Relations Board, the federal agency that oversees such complaints, NPM settled with the workers last month. No union has been formed.

“We did not interfere with any of our employees’ efforts to unionize,” NPM’s chief executive, Bryan Bogensberger, said in a statement.

Tech workers at Silicon Valley’s largest companies have engaged in an unusual degree of activism over the past few years — and it has gotten results. At Google, employees have written letters and signed petitions to force their leaders to address issues such as how artificial intelligence is used in products. Last November, 20,000 Google employees staged a walkout to protest the firm’s handling of sexual harassment, leading to new company policies. Workers at Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft and Salesforce have also pushed for various changes.

But the failed unionization effort at NPM shows the obstacles to employee activism in the tech industry, and how moving from speaking out for change to collective bargaining so far remains a distant prospect.

The difficulties are echoed at other tech companies where recent moves to set up unions have also stalled. At Kickstarter, the crowdfunding site, a unionization effort this year has floundered as organizers struggle to build support. And last year at Lanetix, a logistics software company, more than a dozen engineers were fired after trying to create a union, according to a complaint issued by the NLRB.

A representative from Kickstarter’s organizing campaign said it was “continuing to do the hard work of building a union.” David Gallagher, a Kickstarter spokesman, said its executives had told staff that “Kickstarter is better positioned to overcome its challenges, serve its mission, and do right by its employees and community without the framework of a union.” He added that the company was “in no way seeking to impair the rights of staff members to organize.”

Lanetix’s former chief executive and the company, which has rebranded as Winmore, did not respond to requests for comment.

If workers get as far as trying to organize a union, management sometimes takes aggressive action — including dismissals — to block them. And when workers appeal those dismissals to entities such as the NLRB, tech companies often have the resources to resolve the cases without allowing a union to form.

NPM settled the case brought by three of its former employees, who filed charges with the NLRB alleging they had been dismissed in retaliation for trying to set up a union, paying the workers more than $105,000, according to the employees and the company. Lanetix also settled with 15 workers for $775,000 last year over unfair labor practices claims after negotiations with the NLRB.

Sahil Talwar, who worked at Lanetix as a software developer and was part of the unionization effort, said tech companies worked to make unions seem alien. “Associating unions with blue-collar work and making it a stigma to talk about unions in white-collar circles, that’s very deliberate,” he said.

NPM began as an open-source software project in 2009 before being incorporated in 2014. Based in Oakland, California, it has raised more than $10 million from investors and employs around 50 people, a company spokesman said.

For years, NPM had a forgiving corporate culture, said the current and former employees, three of whom spoke on the record while the others requested anonymity because they feared retaliation. Employees joked that NPM stood for “nice people matter.” (It initially stood for Node Package Manager.) Engineers said they were encouraged to take regular breaks and avoid burnout.

That changed last July when new executives were appointed. To prepare for the debut of a new product, employees were required to work extended shifts and be on call at all hours, the current and former employees said.

In February, they sent a letter to management about their work hours, but said they did not receive a satisfactory response. An NPM spokesman said the company had met one of the letter’s demands — for the tech support department to report directly to engineering.

At a corporate retreat that month, employees raised their concerns with management. They said they had been told that they would need to adopt Silicon Valley’s hard-charging, never-sleep culture or leave the company.

Bogensberger, the chief executive, presented slides warning employees not to be dramatic, which workers interpreted as a veiled reference to their complaints about overwork. Employees also said that women and minorities did not have equitable opportunities for promotion. The company spokesman said NPM had a nearly equal split of male and female employees, though it employs proportionally few minorities.

At the retreat, employees met about unionization, two of the current and former employees said. In March, NPM made the layoffs.





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