Tech Workers Coalition

The Tech Workers Coalition (TWC) is a cross-employer, all-volunteer, and worker-led organization building power for workers in and around the tech industry through rank-and-file self-organization and education. Founded through meetings in 2014 in the San Francisco Bay Area, TWC organizes engineers, support staff, subcontracted workers, and tech-adjacent labour around shared concerns — workplace rights, corporate complicity in state violence, immigration enforcement technology, and AI's impacts on the workforce — while maintaining explicit solidarity between higher-wage engineers and lower-wage service workers at the same companies. Structurally, TWC is a horizontal coalition without traditional union hierarchy: it is not a union and does not hold collective-bargaining authority, but it campaigns, petitions, assists unionization drives, and runs educational programs independently or in coalition with labour unions and civil-society organizations.

Founding and structure

TWC's first meetings began in 2014 in members' apartments in Silicon Valley, organized by cafeteria worker and labor organizer Rachel Melendes and engineer Matt Schaefer. The coalition deliberately avoided the word "founders" — mirroring its challenge to the "Californian Ideology" of capitalist-driven innovation culture — and grew through informal organizing conversations among workers dissatisfied with the industry's treatment of support staff and with the growing uses of tech platforms for surveillance and state violence. By the Trump election in late 2016, the organization was active and expanding: a January 2017 protest of 70 people at Palantir Technologies against its immigration-enforcement contracting work was among TWC's earliest public actions. In early 2017, TWC members assisted Unite Here in organizing the cafeteria staff at Facebook, resulting in successful unionization by July of that year.

As of 2026, TWC operates chapters in eleven US locations (Bay Area, South Bay, NYC, Seattle, Portland, DC, Chicago, North Carolina, San Diego, Canada, and Utah) and three European cities (Berlin, Italy, and Netherlands), with several former chapters in Austin, Boston, Los Angeles, London, Dublin, and Bangalore that have gone inactive. The coalition's core operating model — democratically structured, all-volunteer, in-person chapter meetings combined with online organizing — has remained consistent through a decade of changes in the tech industry's labour environment.

The Maven campaign and cross-employer AI ethics organizing

TWC's most documented contribution to the AI ethics movement is its cross-employer propagation of the spring-2018 Google employee opposition to Project Maven. Fifteen days after the New York Times first reported on the internal Google letter signed by over 3,100 employees demanding the company exit its US Department of Defense AI-drone-imagery contract, TWC published a Coworker.org petition — "Tech should not be in the business of war" — on 19 April 2018, addressed not to Google alone but to Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and IBM, calling on workers across the industry to adopt binding ethical standards for the use of AI. The petition collected 332 signatures across the four companies before being marked "successful" on 1 June 2018, the day Google announced it would not renew the Maven contract. The petition was the first documented hop of the worker-conscience organizing form out of the originating employer into a cross-company coalition — the move from a Google-internal anonymous letter into a cross-industry, named petition — and established TWC as the cross-employer vehicle through which the "no tech for [state-violence system]" framing could be carried beyond any single employer's workforce.

The cross-employer organizing frame has been TWC's consistent structural contribution to the tech-worker conscience movement: where internal worker groups at specific companies (Google, Amazon, Microsoft) organize within their employer's walls, TWC has positioned itself as the industry-wide layer that links those disparate efforts, amplifies demands across employers, and sustains a cross-company network through periods when no single employer's internal campaign is active.

AI workplace organizing and current activity

Through the 2022–2026 cycle of mass tech-industry layoffs — over 600,000 across the sector between 2023 and 2025 — TWC has shifted significant focus toward AI's direct impacts on the tech workforce itself: AI-driven layoffs, algorithmic management, and the use of AI tools to surveil and accelerate workers. In December 2025, TWC launched WorkersDecide.tech, a resource hub for workers organizing against AI workplace impacts, and co-founded What We Will, a worker center providing immediate crisis support and collective-action resources for tech workers displaced by AI.

TWC launched Circuit Breakers, an annual national tech labor conference for rank-and-file organizers in tech, with its inaugural edition in San Francisco in October 2024. The conference has convened workers from across the tech labor movement — including delegates from the Amazon Labor Union, No Azure for Apartheid, and the Content Moderators Union in Africa — for skills trainings, organizing strategy sessions, and cross-sector labor solidarity building. The 2025 and 2026 editions were held in New York City. Circuit Breakers is the most significant recurring infrastructure the tech-worker organizing field has developed since TWC's own founding and represents a consolidation of the disparate chapter-by-chapter organizing model into a national movement-building format.

TWC continues to organize against corporate cooperation with immigration enforcement — the thread it has maintained from the 2017 Palantir protest through the #NoTechForICE coalition era — publishing in February 2026 a resource guide for tech worker activism against ICE contracts as the Trump administration's second-term enforcement expansion accelerated.