TRANSCRIPT OF INTERVIEW WITH Clarissa Redwine and JS Tan

[Francesca]
Clarissa Redwine and JS Tan, welcome to Writer's Voice.

[JS Tan]
Thank you for having us.

[Clarissa Redwine]
Yes, so excited to chat with you. 

[Francesca]
Both of you came to this book as participants in the movement that you examine, first as tech worker organizers and later as union staff. Against Tech Oligarchy argues that organized tech workers could counter the immense political and economic power of the industry's leaders.

But you also offer a candid critique of the strategies that you once championed. Could you introduce yourselves to our audience briefly and explain how your experiences led you to your central argument?

[Clarissa Redwine]
Hey, anyone who's listening to this, I'm Clarissa. I was a tech worker in the late 2010s, joined Kickstarter, and found myself in the middle of a union drive. And that experience was transformative.

It changed how I see the world, how I understand power. And I have been part of the tech labor movement ever since, working on projects like Collective Action in Tech with JS Tan.

[JS Tan]
So, you know, like Clarissa, I also was a tech worker. I joined the industry in the mid-2010s and worked as a software engineer at Microsoft. During that time, I organized, you know, as a worker in really the first phases of the tech worker movement.

So this was around 2017, 2018. And that was kind of a period in which the kind of activism that was primarily happening was what we call political activism by employees. So sort of organizing around these policy issues like, you know, whether our employer should be contracting with ICE or the military or with oil companies.

I later wrote a whistleblower-type essay detailing the collaboration that Microsoft has with Chevron, in particular how Chevron is using Microsoft technologies, cloud and AI technologies to intensify drilling. And that eventually led to my exit from the industry. But yeah, like Clarissa, I stayed involved with the tech worker movement, with organizing in the tech sector through Collective Action in Tech.

But also later, the two of us joined an international union as staffers, where we supported a bunch of different campaigns as well.

[Francesca]
And what union was that?

[JS Tan]
That was United Electrical.

[Francesca]
The great UE with a wonderful history. Now, in the beginning, tech was supposed to be liberating. Democratizing.

Google said, don't be evil. These values were part of a philosophy that you write in the book, in the beginning, unified the managers, the owners of tech companies and their workers. Talk a little bit about those halcyon days of early alignment and values.

And then when did it start to go wrong?

[JS Tan]
That's a great question. And I think this question really gets at this broader question that we try to answer in our book, which is why such a movement emerged in the first place, right? You know, when you think of tech workers in the 2010s, they've long been known for having some of the best jobs on the market, right?

They're paid big salaries, showered with perks. They were very autonomous as workers as well, right? They could sort of choose their own projects and really have a lot of say over how they executed on those projects.

Companies like Google and Meta would sort of be known for being some of the best companies to work at. Even Google themselves awarded, I think, multiple years, the best company to work at. And so you would think that this is kind of a strange setting in which tech worker organizing could happen.

But this was kind of an era in which tech workers and the tech bosses were sort of quite aligned in sort of how they saw technology, right? You know, the tech bosses would sort of say things like, we want to make the world a better place. We want to sort of use the internet to sort of, you know, make things more connected, more open, more democratic.

And I think a lot of tech workers actually bought into this kind of vision for the tech industry. When we joined the tech industry, that was something that both of us actually believed in to a large extent. And so, you know, the other thing that was happening in the 2010s was that the tech industry was also expanding quite rapidly.

And this was also a period in which what the tech companies were saying, you know, don't be evil, more connected, more democratic, was starting to misalign with how the companies themselves were actually being profitable in the world, right? This was kind of an era in which tech companies were, you know, intensifying political polarization. It was revealed that tech companies were also participating in the surveillance of people.

And then tech companies started to contract with the military, started to get involved with ICE in sort of supporting the technical infrastructure, underpinning the ICE agency. And this was a series of events in which the kind of facade that the tech sector had built for itself, being this progressive pro-democracy industry, had started to shatter. And that was also really the moment in which the tech worker movement took off.

There was sort of certainly this broader public backlash. You know, 2018 was sort of regarded in the media as the year of the tech lash. But it was also the time in which tech workers started to act, because I think in large part, they felt betrayed by their employers.

[Francesca]
Clarissa, do you want to follow up on that too?

[Clarissa Redwine]
Yeah, I think something to keep in mind that's very interesting in what we trace in the book is the very ideals and missions that the tech companies used to lay the groundwork for soft policy. You know, the external messaging that allowed them to grow at such a rapid pace, they also turned that inward to encourage their own workers to be fervent supporters of the company's mission and the company's path to dominance, really. It was seen as almost manifest destiny, that we have to get there before anybody else so that we can make sure we liberate the hardest.

You know, and ironically, that messaging, the same thing that, you know, made employees stay late because they cared so much about the projects that they were working on, that it, you know, encouraged employees to upskill on their own time outside of work. All of that conditioning led to the very uprisings and pushback that we saw in the late 2010s.

[Francesca]
Yeah. So let's talk a little bit about Project Maven, because that was, I think, one of the earliest places, if not the earliest, where a group of workers decided to organize against a policy of a company, and that was Google. Tell us about that project and what are some of the lessons of it?

[JS Tan]
So Project Maven was a contract that Google had with the Pentagon. At the time, it was quite secretive, and, you know, there wasn't really that much information about the sort of details and the specifics of the contract. I think now more information about it has come out, and it's essentially a contract that the idea is for using AI and machine learning to help figure out where to target drone strikes.

And especially in 2018, you know, a lot of tech workers were very not happy with the idea of building technology for weapons use. And so when it became revealed that Google had this contract with the Pentagon, a lot of tech workers at the company, you know, and you can imagine Google back in the 2010s, very idealistic, you know, a lot of people coming into the technology, wanting genuinely to do good with the technology, pushed back against this contract. And the way that this happened was that a handful of people started to circulate information about the contract internally and started to sort of build relationships and get people's buy-in.

And, you know, this went on for a couple of months, but ultimately, the way this kind of came together was in a big open letter that ended up being circulated quite broadly across the company, with thousands of Google employees signing on to it in opposition of the contract. And at the end, you know, this open letter was not only, had not only gone viral within the company, but it was also widely reported on, I think even printed itself on the New York Times. And there was this kind of huge public pushback with academics, with sort of other, you know, other members of the public really pushing back against Google's contract with the Pentagon for this particular use case.

And at the end, Google ended up not renewing the project, as well as it seems like really agreeing with the demands of the workers and putting together this set of AI policies that they had sort of agreed that they will uphold to moving forward.

[Clarissa Redwine]
I think something that is critical to understand about this period that JS just talked about with Project Maven, workers, before taking this public with an open letter and really calling out the company, went through multiple forms of internal feedback mechanisms where they were trying to raise this as an issue and get the company to change course. And again and again, they were sidestepped, ignored, placated. And in an attempt to earnestly change what the company was working on and decouple from the military, they looked to public pressure, to a PR campaign essentially, which was effective at that time.

But after the big walkouts, you know, the big open letters, workers saw the aftermath, which was the firings of people who spoke out and were more visible in these walkouts and often the quiet dismantling of any wins that they had earned through that public pressure campaign. And that was a moment for tech workers where we thought, how do we build sustained pressure how do we get structural power in the workplace? And that led many tech workers across the movement to seek unions.

[Francesca]
So this is a critical point that you make, that tech workers began by leveraging their sense of empowerment in the workplace to reach out and use public pressure that worked. But then it led to a backlash on the part of the companies. Now, one interesting thing is you say structural.

Do you feel that the structure of the industry itself mandated that companies would inevitably come to prioritize authoritarian structures at work, privilege, profit making over... I mean, you work for a company, Kickstarter, which was a benefit corporation that's supposed to put public benefit on an equal footing to private profit. So what does this actually say, before we go more into the details about the kind of structural imperatives that these industries are part of?

And do you feel that there is still room to reform the system or does it have to be torn down?

[Clarissa Redwine]
That's such a good question. Such a good question. Yeah, I think I'll start here.

So time and time again, across the tech worker movement, we saw companies that were on the friendlier side of the tech industry still be avid union busters. Kickstarter is one example where at the beginning of the union drive, literally a few meetings before we went public with the union drive, workers were saying, leadership is going to love this. When we take this union drive public, they're going to be so excited to be part of the vanguard of this new leftist movement in the tech industry.

That was not the case. And that happened over and over again at tech companies where for the longest time, tech workers, until there was a moment where the boss showed that they were misaligned with the working class, all the time preceding that moment, workers thought they were on the same side as management, fighting for the same world because they had the same mission. But the moment that the boss has to choose between the mission and profit, again and again, profit is what's chosen or control.

And that is a lesson that tech workers learn most acutely in moments of class conflict. And that's something that we talk about in the book, how important moments of class conflict are.

[Francesca]
J.S., do you want to follow up on that idea of how does conflict create consciousness, class consciousness?

[JS Tan]
So I think in some ways, this is kind of a lesson that we learned from our own experience organizing. You know, for many years, especially coming off the victory of Kickstarter United and it being the first wall-to-wall union in the tech industry, the two of us really believed that the path forward for the tech worker movement was not to continue doing these open letters, these big walkouts, these public pressure campaigns, but rather to focus our energy on helping different campaigns across the industry win unions.

And this was specifically winning legally recognized unions like Kickstarter. And so that was really how we spent a lot of our time over the past five years, really trying to push this agenda across the tech worker movement. What we found in doing this, though, was that in sort of our myopia of trying to really just build our numbers and have lots of one-on-one conversations and work through our spreadsheets of organizing in order to get this majority support at each shop, what we ended up putting aside was these moments of class conflict.

So just to sort of paint that picture a little bit, when a worker came to us and they told us, oh, you know, the team I'm on is really upset about this new leadership change or this team I'm on is really upset about the fact that this new contract was signed with the Pentagon. Rather than sort of taking those issues and building a campaign where we can win something right now, what we ended up doing was really taking those issues and saying, those are great issues. Let's take your energy and put it towards our union drive so that eventually when we do have a union, we can sort of try to address those issues.

[Francesca]
Yeah, it's a question of building power, in a way, is what you were looking for.

[JS Tan]
That's right. But the downside of this approach, however, was that we ended up sort of pushing away these opportunities for workers to clash with the boss, for workers to sort of really see their class position through conflict with the boss. And I think, you know, especially in the tech sector, that ended up being a bit of a problem because within the tech sector, a lot of workers are not class conscious at this point.

They oftentimes see managers as friends or even or, you know, allies who are just doing their best. And so, you know, every single time we skipped these opportunities for class conflict, that meant that workers were sort of not exposed to sort of these clashes and sort of exposed to sort of the class dynamic within the firm.

[Francesca]
And yet you did get class conflict, even within them. I mean, Clarissa, Kickstarter fired you and other organizers, as you just mentioned, and you rejected a severance agreement that contained a non-disparagement clause. You spoke publicly.

How did you evaluate that personal risk? And how can movements actually avoid, can they avoid, depending on exceptional acts of individual sacrifice while they're building this kind of power?

[Clarissa Redwine]
Yeah, yeah. I mean, connecting this question to what JS was just sharing and something we explore in our book, probably 10 minutes into the meeting where they were firing me at Kickstarter for organizing, I thought, there's no way they can fire me. There's no way.

And that was a moment of real learning for me that it doesn't matter what labor laws we have. It doesn't matter what, it doesn't matter if your company is a public benefit corporation. It doesn't matter if your boss voted for Bernie.

The only way to hold our bosses and our companies and institutions accountable is by having pressure from below. And in tech, we've seen over the course of this movement that pressure from below takes practice. It takes moments of class conflict.

And that's something that we try to unpack in the book through multiple stories, through an overview of evolutions in the movement. And I think not only tech workers can learn from this, but the vast majority of workers in the United States are unorganized. You know, we have a very low density of unions in the United States.

And the story in our book is the story of workers learning how to embrace our power.

[Francesca]
And you felt that you had to embrace that power by going even beyond this union organizing. I mean, the union organizing, I believe you call it the recognition playbook, that is obtain legal recognition, negotiate a contract. You know, it's interesting because it kind of recapitulates the history of the union movement in a larger sense.

I mean, the 1930s union movements were very politicized. And the union that you eventually joined is one of the last unions that has continued to be political. But it was labeled communist during the McCarthy period.

And, you know, it's not as big or strong as the IBEW, which took the other tack, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, who took the other tack, which is just to focus on the so-called bread and butter issues. So talk about how this evolved from the recognition playbook, the building of power. What were the difficulties?

What were the constraints of that recognition playbook? And how did you evolve beyond that? And either of you can take a stab or both.

[Clarissa Redwine]
I'll get us started. You know, the early days of the tech worker movement, where tech workers would discover that Google was making technology for the military. The acts that tech workers took, where there was mass unrest, there was organizing, there were walkouts, there were op-eds, fiery op-eds.

These were all actions taken by workers who had no constraints. They only wanted to win. And what we saw was when workers started to pursue legally recognized unions, what we misunderstood as a movement was leverage does not come from recognition.

It does not come from your boss saying, OK, you won an election. You got me. I'll sit down at the bargaining table with you.

That is not how we're going to win. And it took us years to learn that lesson because the process itself of building majority support, going for an election, then sitting down at the bargaining table takes years. And that is a process that was constructed to slow worker uprisings.

And yeah, it took me and JS many years to learn that lesson and something that tech workers are all across the movement are learning and responding to by taking more direct action.

[JS Tan]
Yeah. I'll maybe just give an example of perhaps a limitation of what we call the recognition playbook. So, you know, in the recognition playbook, you know, in broad strokes, the steps of winning a contract is you sort of you have your organizing committee.

You do a lot of one on one outreach. You sort of build up your campaign. Eventually you vote to unionize and then you're allowed to bargain.

And maybe at the point of bargaining, your union goes on strike to sort of get your demands through. Right. And there you've got your first big win.

But the problem with this approach in the tech sector is that the idea of the strike itself is not something that tech workers are are familiar with or it's not something that we've figured out how to do. And we saw this, I think, perhaps most clearly when the New York Times Tech Guild went on the first ever tech worker strike. And in fact, they struck on the day of the presidential election in twenty twenty four.

Right. So you would think, you know, an onlooker might think that this is a day where these workers, if they walked off the job, would have huge leverage. But it turns out when they went on strike on that day, nothing broke.

Right. And that has to do with the very nature of tech work itself. Right.

The day to day work of a tech worker is to sort of automate for their employers the generation of profit and revenue. So, you know, if we were just to contrast it with, let's say, factory workers or workers at a hospital, you know, if they walked off the job, the factory shuts down, the hospital is no longer operational. But when tech workers walk off the job, the code continues to run, the software continues to run.

And so the kind of leverage that tech workers have is actually very different. And I think it's something that is still in need of of real creativity to be able for us to discover it.

[Francesca]
And of course, the big elephant in the room is AI, generative AI. Tech workers went from a place where they had an enormous amount of power. There was a huge increase in the tech industry.

They needed the workers. The workers had the kind of knowledge that was not, you know, common. It isn't like, you know, being, you know, working in a McDonald's that can be done easily to now where what you just talked about, creating the code that creates the profit by itself is exponentially larger.

What are the leverages of power that tech workers still have?

[Clarissa Redwine]
I'll start with this story that I think is illustrative of the challenge that tech workers are up against. You know, we gave this book the title Against Tech Oligarchy because tech workers are no longer just up against their boss. They're up against an actor that is shaping society in a much more significant way.

And when we were organizing a union at Twitter, Elon Musk leaked that he was planning to cut 75% of the workforce. And at the time, you know, we were support staff for the workers who were at Twitter building their union. And we really didn't think that was serious.

We thought, no way that the platform would keep running. He needs this platform to keep running. He needs the revenue.

There's no way he's going to cut 75%. And he did. And that was a shock.

And what was even more of a shock was the platform kept running. You know, for all intents and purposes, Twitter stayed alive, which we did not think was possible. And that was really a reckoning, not just for me and JS, but for many tech workers across the industry who were watching essentially a relatively strong strike that happened at Twitter, but implemented by the boss himself.

And, you know, tech workers right now, other than getting everyone to walk off the job, there's not a strong consensus on how we halt revenue. And our book, we try not to be prescriptive. We're simply presenting and inviting people into the challenge of being creative.

You know, what will be our sit down strike? What will be our flying picket? That's something for the tech worker movement to figure out in this next chapter.

[JS Tan]
Yeah. Maybe if I can just build on that, you know, I think one additional thing that we really try to advocate for in our book is that the sort of best practices of the established labor movement are just tools and they're not always going to work well in every context. And so the idea that we want to give to tech workers is that leverage is not something that's going to be uniform across roles in a company, across teams in a company, and even across companies within the industry.

In each of these circumstances, tech workers need to have an analysis of where their power is and where their leverage is. Right. It's going to look totally different for the salespeople who are helping to push enterprise software across the economy, as it will for the graphic designers who are designing the platforms that we're using today.

In each of these cases, they need to have an analysis of what their labor is and as a result, where their leverage is.

[Francesca]
And yet, solidarity across sectors is a very key element of building worker power. I mean, I think, for example, of Sean Fain of the UAW, who is, you know, has talked about building toward a general strike that will unify workers throughout the country. And that's why he's trying to get all the contracts to kind of come up at the same time.

Now, that is one industry, perhaps, but the UAW organizes people in many, many different industries, including information and knowledge workers. So how do you integrate the kind of specific building of a power analysis in the particular workplace and building a more powerful movement that can even unite with people who are not working in the tech industry in a project to create the kind of structural change that this book argues for?

[JS Tan]
Yeah, I think the general strike is something that I bring up a lot whenever I'm talking about organizing to tech workers. You know, in order for a general strike to be effective in an industry or even trying to shut down a city, the individual shops need to know how to strike in order to make the collective effective and to really amplify that chaos that workers are creating in order to say, come to the table, meet our demands. And a tech company is somewhat of a city in itself, or even a nation, where the individual groups within that company, individual roles, departments, products, need to understand how to halt production, how to create chaos.

And like JS was saying, that can look different in different areas of the company. So I think when we think about a general strike, that's what I think about. It's like, how can we bring this back to the shop floor so that you can organize and build power as locally as possible in order to be truly effective and contribute to the whole?

[Francesca]
Act locally.

[JS Tan]
How does that go? Strike locally, strike globally.

[Francesca]
That's great. Yeah. But you're talking about really going beyond that recognition playbook.

What does that look like?

[Clarissa Redwine]
You know, I think it means that when the recognition playbook really came to be in the tech worker movement, I think there was a lot of blind faith given to internationals, even though obviously the internationals are coming in with a lot of experience, but they don't have this kind of close understanding of tech work and leverage in the tech industry. And so our sort of call to action for the tech worker movement to go beyond the recognition playbook is really a call for workers to have this kind of close attention to their own labor processes and as a result, where their leverage is. And, you know, it is a very large and in some ways daunting task because that level of analysis has to happen throughout the entire movement.

Like we were saying, a worker's leverage in the tech sector is going to look different depending on the role, depending on the team, depending even on the business model of the company that they're at. And so the call to action we have is to really is to say that workers really need to have this level of analysis everywhere across the movement. They need to be attentive to their own labor processes.

And as a result, they need to develop an analysis and a theory of where their leverage is.

[JS Tan]
And test it and test it.

[Francesca]
Yeah. In fact, I want to get back to that, but leverage for what? Because you do bring up the issue of structural change.

What does that mean for you and how is it built?

[JS Tan]
Yeah. Speaking of labor law and established labor practices and what are we building this labor for? In the early days of the tech worker movement, there was no concept of management rights.

Tech workers thought we build these companies, we should have a say in what we build and how we impact society. There was no question that is that something that we should leave in the hands of management? No.

And, you know, something that we inadvertently captured in our book was by telling the story of tech workers embracing labor tradition that is tied up with labor law. We saw a lot of the ambitions of the tech worker movement, you know, curbing Amazon's carbon emissions, decoupling Google from the military. These were huge asks, huge demands, ambitious.

We saw those really wane as workers started to take on these more traditional steps toward unionization and recognition where, you know, instead of really curbing emissions or doing something really amazing and changing the face of your company and what you're choosing to work on. Instead, workers were simply trying to have layoff protections, which don't get me wrong. Every worker deserves that.

That is absolutely a win, but it is not the kind of ambition that we saw before tech workers started to follow the letter of labor law. And I think it somewhat also echoes the story of how labor law has shaped the working class in general. Say more about that.

So in the National Labor Relations Act, they are explicit that these rules, this process is meant to create labor peace between workers and our bosses to keep everything running, to minimize disruption. And the only way that workers are going to win is through disruption. So what we saw with tech workers embracing the recognition playbook, seeing their ambitions blunted, seeing their ability to build a strike threat delayed, all of that also took place for the entire working class with the advent of the NLRA and the NLRB.

[Francesca]
Yeah, I want to ask, and either of you can answer that or both. It seems to me that now as we confront, and I'll come back to AI, we confront a technology that some people think could not only end all employment, but could end the human race. It's moving extremely quickly and it almost demands that larger view of structural change, because if we are going to have a technology that will benefit the planet and people instead of destroy the planet and people, we are going to have to wrench it away from the techno-fascists that are leading the industry.

What does that mean for the kind of organizing you're talking about, the use of conflict as a way to build class solidarity? Yeah.

[JS Tan]
JS and I have stayed in the tech worker movement and we do this work because we see tech workers as a critical lever for holding these increasingly powerful oligarchs to account. There's no law or policy that will keep Google from aiding genocide in Gaza. There are no regulations that are going to bring Amazon's climate impact down to where it should be.

These are things that tech workers have achieved, but the problem is we haven't learned how to defend those wins. That's the next chapter of the tech worker movement.

[Francesca]
Do you want to follow up on that, JS? What does it mean to defend?

[Clarissa Redwine]
Yeah, that's a great question. I see these two questions that you raised and the point that maybe together at once we're up against this technology that is completely changing the tech workforce and the way tech work happens. And we're also facing the tech oligarchy that is increasingly powerful, both economically and politically and unregulatable, right?

There's sort of government capture. And I think if we kind of continue down the path of the recognition playbook and winning unions before we do anything, we would have to go through the slog of getting majority support, winning a union, sitting down to bargain a contract. And by that point, it will all be too late, right?

And so I think part of the reason we wrote this book is certainly to be able to sort of talk about the history of the tech worker movement. But really it is to also make the case that the need for tech worker organizing is more urgent than ever. It is something that we feel is one of the only levers that we as a society have left to sort of push back against sort of this confluence of AI or rather the sort of tech oligarchy barreling forward with AI progress and technology, often at the expense of workers.

[JS Tan]
Yeah. And you asked about AI earlier in our conversation and I brought up Twitter and Elon Musk cutting 75% of the workforce because that was a moment that we didn't take the oligarchy seriously. And when these oligarchs talk about their visions for society, we should take them seriously and understand that they have every resource they need, every official in their pocket.

Like the only thing that will slow them down or reverse course is pressure from below and strategic pressure from below. And that comes within their own empires.

[Francesca]
Well, the book is against tech oligarchy, worker resistance in the world's most powerful industry. It's really, it was a great read and it has so many important lessons to it. Clarissa Redwine and JS Tan, thank you so much for talking with us.

This is a conversation that I hope goes on and on in ever increasing living rooms and workplaces.

[JS Tan]
Thank you so much for having us. Yeah.

[Clarissa Redwine]
Thank you so much for having us and asking all the