(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- By January, Bjorn Westergard says, he and his fellow coders had finally had enough. In the space of two months, Lanetix, the Bay Area cloud-software startup he worked for, had allegedly dismissed a colleague who’d advocated for more paid time off, discouraged the remaining staff from discussing workplace problems, and implied that their jobs could move to Eastern Europe. So Westergard helped persuade the company’s dozen other software engineers, spread between San Francisco and Arlington, Va., to do something almost unheard-of in the field: organize a union. Together, he believed, they could demand some job security, improve their working conditions, and set an example for the rest of the industry. “I was really hoping we could plant the flag and say, ‘Hey, this is something that can make companies better,’ ” he says.
Lanetix hasn’t yet set the example Westergard wanted. The engineers say that about a week after a majority of them petitioned to unionize, higher-ups told them their positions were all being eliminated, effective immediately. The employees suspected this meant their jobs were headed to the new Eastern European engineering center announced weeks earlier, but the company wouldn’t answer their questions. Now the coders are bringing their case to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), testing the Trump administration’s repeated promises to stop U.S. companies from shifting jobs abroad.
Retaliation for union organizing is a crime under federal labor law, a fact Westergard says left him unduly confident that he wouldn’t be in this position. “I did kind of give people assurances that they would be protected from this particular thing,” he says. “It remains to be seen whether we will.” Lanetix, which develops productivity apps for companies including DHL International GmbH and Anheuser-Busch InBev SA, didn’t respond to requests for comment. The NLRB declined to comment.
The Communications Workers of America (CWA), the union Westergard and his colleagues petitioned to join, has complained to the labor board. It’s also asking NLRB General Counsel Peter Robb, a Trump appointee who helped dissolve the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization during the Reagan years, to seek an injunction reinstating the engineers. If the feds don’t act, they’ll embolden more companies to shop American jobs to foreign countries, says Joseph McCartin, a labor historian at Georgetown University. “It would be deeply ironic if appointees of an administration that’s committed to stopping the offshoring of jobs and to bringing offshored jobs back help facilitate offshoring,” he says.
The Lanetix layoffs illustrate the difficulty of organizing software engineers, who tend to be confident their skills will keep them in demand or afraid that collective action could get them blacklisted. To the extent that unions have been able to organize tech workers in the past several years, it’s mostly been the industry’s traditionally third-class citizens, such as contract cafeteria workers and custodians. The lack of collective recourse is one reason industry turnover remains high: It’s often easier for engineers to simply find new jobs than to negotiate workplace issues.
Westergard and several other former Lanetix employees say that before trying to organize, they’d long commiserated on Slack about the lack of salary transparency and other perceptions of unfair treatment. They say the company had assured them their jobs would be safe alongside the Eastern European team, and that changed only after they petitioned to unionize.
Employers in all kinds of industries get away with intimidating workers by threatening to relocate jobs, says Kate Bronfenbrenner, Cornell’s director of labor education research. But management attorneys say companies need the discretion to locate production where it’s most efficient. “If you look at tech companies historically, one big issue is they often have people who are highly skilled, but they just don’t have the right skill,” says attorney Douglas Darch, who’s represented hospitals, as well as waste management and landscaping companies. “It’s like making your punter kick a field goal.”
High salaries are only one obstacle to organizing coders. Unions are struggling in Silicon Valley partly because many engineers identify strongly with their employers and others have a libertarian bent, says Ares Geovanos, an organizer for the volunteer Tech Workers Coalition. The TWC, which has offered training on workplace rights and mobilized engineers to support service staff and oppose Trump’s travel ban, plans to do what it can to support the terminated Lanetix staff.
“We’re looking at this as a moment that’s going to set the trajectory of what happens with other organizing efforts,” Geovanos says. With good organizing, the showdown could help galvanize a broader labor movement in the tech industry, he says—but it also threatens to reinforce skeptics’ worst fears about organized labor.
Beyond the NLRB complaint, the labor groups and their allies are still working out their next moves, says CWA organizer Melinda Fiedler. Many of the former Lanetix workers have refused a severance agreement that would have restricted their ability to publicly criticize and legally challenge the company, so while they pursue an injunction, CWA organizers plan to relay the dispute to labor groups at some of Lanetix’s clients. “They have a union, even if it’s not documented on paper,” Fiedler says. “They’re going to be able to fight back.”Hassan Kanu is a legal reporter for Bloomberg Law.
To contact the authors of this story: Josh Eidelson in Washington at jeidelson@bloomberg.net, Hassan Kanu in Arlington at hkanu2@bloomberg.net.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Mark Milian at mmilian@bloomberg.net, Jeff Muskus
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