Tech Workers Are Fighting Against Silicon Valley’s AI Push | TechPolicy.PressNews<br>Tech Workers Are Fighting Against Silicon Valley’s AI Push<br>Varsha Bansal / Jun 17, 2026Varsha Bansal is a fellow at Tech Policy Press.<br>A Meta sign at Meta Headquarters in Menlo Park, California, in January 2025. Shutterstock

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On May 12, Meta employees in at least five US offices posted flyers asking workers to come together and sign a petition against the company’s new Model Capability Initiative (MCI)—which allows Meta to collect its employees’ computer use data to train AI models. Over 1,600 workers have signed the petition. Earlier in May, Google DeepMind workers in the UK voted to unionize in a bid to fight against the company providing AI for military use. In April, over 600 of the laid off Oracle employees signed a letter asking the company for higher severance and longer healthcare — after they came together to discuss their issues. They claim that Oracle was using them to train AI systems, and then fired them.<br>Since 2025, close to 400,000 tech workers have been laid off — of which over 150,000 were let go this year alone, with several explicitly fired due their company’s increased focus on artificial intelligence. At the same time, many of these companies have reported increased profits. This paradox has shattered a long-held assumption: that white-collar tech workers don’t need unions.<br>There’s a tech worker movement brewing across companies and continents. As tech companies embrace AI — forcing workers to use it, using it to surveil them, or justify firing them because of it — more workers are coming together to organize and fight back as they feel they are losing influence over decisions that affect their jobs. This collective action is their way to get back the voice they used to have at their workplace, more than half a dozen tech workers told Tech Policy Press.<br>“Most people coming in right now are interested in unionizing,” said Kaitlin Cort, founder of a new organizing group for tech workers impacted by AI called What We Will. “That was not the case before.”<br>Meta, Alphabet and Oracle did not respond to a request for comment by Tech Policy Press.<br>Meta workers rise up<br>The past few months have been demoralizing for Meta workers. First, they were told their computer usage including mouse movements and keystrokes will be tracked to train AI models. Then, thousands were forced to move to AI-specific teams just before the company let go of around 10% of its workforce in May. The morale is so low, that some of the workers drafted to an AI team, which they say involves data labelling work for Meta’s AI model, exchanged their frustration in internal chat conversations with their colleagues that they’d rather be laid off. “Getting drafted, can I switch with someone getting laid off instead?” posted a Meta worker on this internal chat, viewed by Tech Policy Press.<br>It was around this sentiment that one Meta worker in London realized that they had two options: they could either quit or do something about this situation. They chose the latter.<br>Even until recently, most of their colleagues didn’t feel the need to organize. “They just felt like high pay, chance of layoff, fair deal, I'll take it,” said this worker, who requested anonymity due to fear of professional reprisal. “But when it’s high pay, chance of layoff, and all the other stuff, invasive monitoring, training these various questionable models, and being treated with absolute disrespect and no dignity — now people are ready.”<br>This worker decided to band together with others to organize. They changed their name on internal online platforms to “Union Rep” and started discussing with colleagues about the options they had to fight back, and that they only need 500 people to get signed up and get recognized as a union. “We have a path,” this worker said. “Let's drive towards it.”<br>They reached out to all the unions possible, and teamed up with United Tech and Allied Workers (UTAW), a branch of the Communications Workers Union. “We're a few weeks in, we’ve got a good number of sign ups,” said this Meta worker. “It’s looking positive. Our next stage really is trying to just go from hundreds to thousands. My goal is to build large support that can actually change what the company is doing.”<br>Meanwhile, Meta workers’ pushback against MCI seemed to have had some impact: earlier this month, Meta said they will allow employees to pause data collection for up to 30 minutes at a time.<br>The different waves of tech worker organizing<br>There have been a few waves of tech workers organizing in the past, says Emily Mazo, a tech labor collective action researcher at Columbia University, with two distinct periods in recent years. One took place from roughly 2014 to 2019, when workers mostly organized around external issues. Their concerns ranged from immigration policy and government contracts, to race and gender discrimination. That wave, Mazo explains, led into a second...