Bosses Bite Back

Unions had some key wins in tech in 2022, but so did their opponents

- Matt Day

The largest US technology companies spent decades arguing that they were different from the corporate stalwarts that came before them: more productive, quicker to disregard convention, more focused on making their customers' life better. Fixtures of the old economy-in particular, regulations and unionswere inappropriate for innovative companies such as theirs, built on speed and flexibility.

In 2022 labor unions came for Big Tech anyway and scored some surprising election wins. But as the year wore on, it became clear that those skirmishes, which have yet to yield a collective contract between management and workers, were simply the start of a long battle with the industry.

In April workers at a massive Amazon.com Inc. warehouse in New York City's Staten Island voted to join the upstart Amazon Labor Union in the first successful union drive at one of the retailer's US facilities. The win made Chris Smalls, a fired mer employee and the group's leader, an immediate folk hero, sending him on a one-man tour to speak before other labor groups and to meet with would-be organizers, as well as to appear on news shows (page 38). Two months later, workers at an Apple Inc. retail store in Towson, Maryland, voted to join the International Association of Machinists, the first union win at the iPhone maker. A store in Oklahoma City did the same in October, with the Communications Workers of America.