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Could trade unions be gaining ground in the UK’s tech industry?

For decades, trade unions held next to no sway in the UK’s tech sector, as an abundance of high-paying jobs and the freewheeling attitude of industry leaders kept their membership numbers low.

But an increasingly rigid labour market coupled with the rise of AI has sparked greater concerns on job security – and union bosses are seizing the moment.

“It was such a saturated sector that if you lost jobs somewhere, you could always get something somewhere else,” says Sarthak, a software developer at Deliveroo, who has worked at the firm since 2022 after a spell in the banking sector.

He now worries there is a lackadaisical quality to the hiring and firing of workers. “People are being treated like they’re disposable”.

Sarthak’s view is echoed by John Chadfield, a former systems engineer who would go on to co-found the United Tech and Allied Workers (UTAW) in 2022.

“In the late noughties….if I didn’t like where I was working, I could just open up the job site. I’d apply to 10 jobs, and I’d get interviews from eight,” he said.

“People were able to exercise their individual labour market power, whereas now that’s not the case anymore.”

Unions are capitalising on the growing trend of labour precarity in the sector. Organisers at major unions like Unite, Prospect, and the Communication Workers Union (CWU) are all making efforts to increase their tech offerings.

Some are simply pouring more resources into their existing tech sectors. Others like the CWU have set up independently operating branches like UTAW, the UK’s only union exclusively for tech workers.

Membership as a proportion of all workers has, however, been historically low. Estimates by CompTIA, an international tech industry association, put the total number of workers in the UK’s tech industry at just over 2 million, but the UK government says that only around 6% of the information and communications industry are unionised. In contrast, unionised workers accounted for 45.7% of the workforce in the education sector, according to the latest data.

“It’s really only in the last five or six years that there’s been a union for tech workers”, says Chadfield. “As the industry was growing up in the 1980s, traditional unions were fighting for their lives. The two just kind of missed each other.”

But Rachel Curley, the deputy general secretary of Prospect, says that the tides are turning. Their tech branch is one of its larger branches and has been showing strong growth in the past three years.

Workers from across the sector are joining too, with membership coming from small startups as well as larger employers like Microsoft, Bumble, Deliveroo, and Spotify.

This is also the case at UTAW. Chadfield says “even though we’re still small, we’re growing rapidly”. In the 4 years the union has been active it has gained over 5,000 members through organic growth with plans to scale up in the future.

UK unions are also beginning to flex their muscles in the tech sector. The Independent Workers Union of Great Britain (IWGB) and Deliveroo have been sparring for years as the union has attempted to get the firm to recognise its delivery riders as employees instead of independent contractors.

This came to a head in 2023 when the UK’s Supreme Court ruled in Deliveroo’s favour and decreed that the firm did not have to provide benefits—like sick leave, holiday pay, and minimum wage—to its riders, nor listen to collective bargaining efforts.

The same picture can be seen across the world. In Europe, workers’ rights groups have sparred with tech giants like TikTok. Meanwhile, in America workers at Alphabet, Google’s parent company, unionised in 2021 and larger unions like the Communications Workers of America have started to pick up thousands of members in the tech industry.

Among the most visible threats to Big Tech working practices has been at Amazon where over 10,000 workers at 10 of its US warehouses have unionised to demanded better wages, job security and benefits.

The Amazon Labour Union (ALU), founded in 2021, notably went on strike last December after Amazon refused to start negotiations with the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, a larger union with which the ALU is affiliated.

Despite strikes at seven US warehouses, Amazon says that none of its operations or deliveries were affected by the action.

Amazon workers go on strike | Credit: Shutterstock

Back in the UK, a growth in union membership could soon be on the horizon thanks to government policy. Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour government is in the process of passing its Employment Rights Bill which it says will bring the biggest employment reforms in a generation.

This includes increases to union power as employers are mandated to inform workers of their right to join a union when they sign their contracts. Rights of unions to access to workplaces will also be beefed up.

The Bill is still in the consultation stage and is yet to receive a second reading or royal assent but is expected to become law in 2026.

Rachel Curley tells UKTN that the bill “could be a game changer.” This is because many tech workers are “information poor” when it comes to knowing their rights around unionisation.

This is compounded by the lower average age of tech workers. Chadfield who says that “research shows that people under the age of 40 don’t know what unions are and don’t have experience with them.”

With more information being given to workers, they could start to join unions at a much faster rate.

But even without the Bill, workers’ willingness to join a union is already seeing a shift. Sarthak, says that “five or six years ago you were getting one or two people at a time if you were lucky. It was slow.”

But, after a wave of redundancies swept Deliveroo in 2023, people started to “wake up to the realities of working in technology”.

“People are now much more willing to think they’re not just an individual in this sector. They are part of a larger collective here and need to work together to make sure that companies are held accountable.”

The same willingness to unionise can be seen at Monzo, which made headlines in 2022 when staff at the challenger bank wrote to company management to inform them of their intention to form a union.

In the years since, workers at Monzo have been growing their union, which is yet to be recognised by the bank, according to a data analyst UKTN spoke with.

“A lot of people are actually joining and thinking, Monzo is meant to be this progressive, cool, new place, but I can’t even guarantee my employment rights in the same way that I could at Santander or Lloyds.”

The analyst, who wished to remain anonymous, said that campaigning for fairer pay for those on the lower end of the scale “was always the big issue” at Monzo. But for those on higher pay conversations tend to be about working conditions and having a voice to lobby employers.

Monzo
“Monzo is meant to be this progressive, cool, new place, but I can’t even guarantee my employment rights in the same way that I could at Santander or Lloyds,” one staffer said. | Image credit: Monzo

This is a wider trend. Chadfield says that workers on high salaries are not looking to use their internal labour market leverage to improve their pay. Instead, he highlights that many members have strong senses of social justice.

In Google and its AI unit, DeepMind, for example, he says that the reason workers joined these companies “was to do good and so they’re mostly dismayed that their labour goes to these companies that are involved with things that are not good.”

“[People are saying] I want my company to stop putting kids in cages and taking ICE contracts in the States. I want company not to be involved in this. I don’t want my labour to go this.”

Advancements in AI development also count as a reason that some in the tech sector are unionising. A recent study by the Institute for Public Policy Research said that up to eight million jobs in the UK could be at risk from the technology, with entry level jobs being disproportionately affected.

Sarthak tells UKTN that “this is where software developers come off as mad scientists. Because one minute they’re raving, saying ‘let me use Chat GPT to write my code’, and at the same time going, ‘oh no, Chat GPT is going to write my code.’”

While he says that generative AI models are not yet advanced enough to take the jobs of developers, the threat is still there. Nevertheless, he believes that the technology could have “devastating effects” for “people who can least afford it” – notably those employed in jobs like customer care.

To add to employee woes, AI could also bring about a mass deskilling in the sector, warns Chadfield.

“Companies are shooting themselves in the foot [by using AI]. Juniors are now using these tools to help them script code, but they’re not gaining experience to become mid or senior level developers in the traditional sense,” he said.

“That’s the gold dust. That’s what the industry always lacks. Now we’re going to have a plethora of junior developers who stay junior because they’ve removed themselves from the traditional mentorship cycles of working with senior developers.”

Unions are also facing challenges from employers. The rise of remote working is among these. At Monzo, the anonymous worker tells UKTN that there is no noticeboard that union literature is allowed to be posted on, and there are fewer opportunities for ‘water cooler’ conversations with prospective members.

“Most communications are on Slack, and we’ve seen that Slack has been locked down since we started unionising. You can’t talk about the union in big announcement channels or general channels.”

Instead, mentions of the union can only be made in a dedicated Slack channel that already contains members – it’s a “catch-22”, says the worker. Furthermore, there’s a sense that Big Brother is watching when union communications are done through messaging software used by Monzo.

“We find it hard to recruit because messages on Slack aren’t private. So there is a sense of surveillance that’s hard to fight against.”

Amid these challenges, there is a feeling of a steady drumbeat of momentum behind efforts to organise. Union reps and workers that spoke to UKTN all mentioned that the movement is quickly reaching the critical mass needed to make unionising a part of the sector’s culture.

With support from the Labour government, which at least on paper is more pro-union than previous administrations, the union movement in tech seems capable of major growth in the coming years. Chadfield is adamant: “It’s inevitable. It’s a matter of time.”

The post Could trade unions be gaining ground in the UK’s tech industry? appeared first on UKTN.

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