Rising anger over widespread layoffs, disillusionment with Big Tech, and threats of mass displacement by AI have tech pros taking a good, hard look at unions.
I’ve been in IT for 20 years, I have published books, regularly speak at conferences, been recognized by industry leading companies as one of the top experts in the world, and I’ve made solutions that have made my company millions of dollars. Yet, I have constant fear of being laid off. I know I’m seriously underpaid, my last pay hike came when I was on a call with one of our internal recruiters and they let it split that a job posting we were working on would X amount, which was about $20k below what I was making.
The sad thing is I’ve been looking on and off for the past 2 years. I’ve had a couple of offers, but they have all tried to low-ball me at the last minute or lied about the job actually being remote. But over the past few weeks, I’ve seen less and less jobs actually getting posted. A year ago when I would check LinkedIn and there was hundreds of jobs posted daily. Today, one of my searches returned 4 jobs and another returned zero. On top of that 90% of the ones that are posted are from shady recruiters just trying to collect your data.
All that is to say, yes please! But I haven’t actually heard anyone talk about unions.
Join Tech Workers Coalition, What We Will or any other tech alt-labor organization in your area. There are plenty of tech workers talking about unions.
That is depressing seeing the defunct chapters on the Tech Workers Coalition website. Especially in places like Austin and San Jose. What is “What We Will”? I’m not finding anything searching for that.
I’ve been in IT for 20 years, I have published books, regularly speak at conferences, been recognized by industry leading companies as one of the top experts in the world, and I’ve made solutions that have made my company millions of dollars. Yet, I have constant fear of being laid off. I know I’m seriously underpaid, my last pay hike came when I was on a call with one of our internal recruiters and they let it split that a job posting we were working on would X amount, which was about $20k below what I was making.
The sad thing is I’ve been looking on and off for the past 2 years. I’ve had a couple of offers, but they have all tried to low-ball me at the last minute or lied about the job actually being remote. But over the past few weeks, I’ve seen less and less jobs actually getting posted. A year ago when I would check LinkedIn and there was hundreds of jobs posted daily. Today, one of my searches returned 4 jobs and another returned zero. On top of that 90% of the ones that are posted are from shady recruiters just trying to collect your data.
All that is to say, yes please! But I haven’t actually heard anyone talk about unions.
Join Tech Workers Coalition, What We Will or any other tech alt-labor organization in your area. There are plenty of tech workers talking about unions.
That is depressing seeing the defunct chapters on the Tech Workers Coalition website. Especially in places like Austin and San Jose. What is “What We Will”? I’m not finding anything searching for that.
It’s a spin-off of TWC, now independent, focused on layoff support and advocacy: https://wwwrise.org/
Making the domain www without the dot is the dumbest way to cause people to think that it’s a scam site.