They just formed the biggest tech worker union in the US. They plan to rein in AI and curb layoffs

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They just formed the biggest tech worker union in the US. They plan to rein in AI and curb layoffs<br>"Who AI benefits and who it immiserates often is based on who gets to decide how it’s used. We know how tech is used on the day to day. We should be at the table as well."

Brian Merchant<br>May 22, 2026

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As AI sweeps through the American education system and US tech workers stare down the specter of mass layoffs, thousands of IT employees across the statewide University of California system have voted to unionize. They join over 6,000 tech workers already represented by University and Professional Technical Employees (UPTE), expanding the total to 8,400 workers across the bargaining unit. That makes the new unit the largest tech worker union in the nation.

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UPTE calls it “a major victory for workers’ rights in the technology sector,” and that feels apt. Historically, the tech industry has been under-organized; for decades, tech firms have sought to pre-empt or ward off unionization by offering cushy perks and leaning into the entrepreneurial, laissez-faire ethos of Silicon Valley. But times are changing, and organized labor has made inroads. Hundreds of Google employees and contractors voted to form the Alphabet Worker’s Union in 2021—it doesn’t have full bargaining power but has proved influential nonetheless—and workers at tech companies like Kickstarter and at the New York Times’ tech desk (which was previously the nation’s largest tech worker union) have successfully organized in recent years. More recently, workers at Google’s DeepMind headquarters in London have voted to unionize.<br>The UC tech workers’ victory could thus not come at a better time, both for the thousands of employees themselves, and for a public that could use some working examples of how AI might be democratically implemented and governed. There’s been plenty of handwringing, after all, over how we might navigate the rise of AI in the workplace, orchestrating good technical governance of the systems, and the threat of ever more layoffs blamed on AI, but here we have a rather straightforward and obvious part of the solution: Give workers a seat at the table in formulating how to use (or not to use) the technology, and a democratic means of determining how task and labor replacement might be administrated.<br>“Honestly I’m elated,” Max Belasco, a business systems analyst at UCLA, tells me. “I think it’s very easy to feel siloed or removed from your coworkers in IT/tech,” he continues. “But that so many of us clearly feel the same way has felt so empowering and vindicating.”

UPTE tech workers, newly organized. Image: UPTE.<br>The campaign to expand the UPTE union picked up steam over the last year, focusing on layoff protections, wage increases, and AI governance as key issues. (For non-Californians, the reason the union is so big and potentially influential is because the UC system itself is enormous: It comprises ten campuses, including UC Berkeley, UCLA, and Santa Cruz, as well as multiple research centers and major healthcare providers. It’s a massive institution. To wit: I’m an alum of UC Santa Barbara and UCLA is my healthcare provider. My son was born at a UCLA hospital.)<br>With the victory, thousands of tech workers join an existing UPTE contract that grants them raises and improved benefits, as well as layoff protections that compel the University of California to offer employees who would otherwise be laid off the first vacant position that they’re qualified for. “That type of job security is unheard of in the current tech market,” Belasco says.<br>“Some of us worked in industry before coming to the UC, and now we’re in this environment right now where tech companies are laying off people by the tens of thousands, and that precarity has lent a level of urgency to the whole campaign,” Belasco says. “The narrative in tech now is all about the unilateral power executives wield over our workplace circumstances, and I think many of us felt in the UC that creeping sense of being left out of decision making in how to implement technology for the public good.”<br>To that end, the contract includes the right to collectively bargain over the introduction of new AI tools in the workplace, offering workers a direct say in how they will be used.<br>“We know when you try to make quick, dirty decisions to cut labor through AI, you’re actually creating a more vulnerable system,” Dan Russell, a UC Berkeley business technology support analyst and the president of UPTE, said in statement. “On paper, AI can make us more ‘productive’ at our jobs, but the people making those recommendations to UC are management consultants who don’t have the knowledge or expertise we have as workers.” Russell also notes that he hopes the contract will “set the tone” not just for UC workers but everyone who relies on the system for education...