Dear Designer

Dear Designer: The Union Organizer’s Guide to Tech People

To support the coming wave of organized labor in tech, unions need to modernize and learn to communicate with this vast workforce

Illustration: Eugenia Mello

Dear Mike,

I’m a union organizer. In the last few months we’ve started getting a lot of calls from workers in the tech industry looking to unionize. We don’t have a lot of experience talking to tech people. A few of them said they were contacting us because of an article you wrote about how to form a union, so we were wondering if maybe you could help us get the lay of the land.

Dear Union Organizer,

Thanks for reaching out. Happy to help as much as I can. As long as we agree that I’ll be painting with a broad brush and making some big generalizations. Once you get in front of real people and start talking about their real problems, anything they tell you should supersede anything you’re reading here. K? Let’s roll.

Why now?

First off we should probably discuss why this is happening at this particular moment in time. To do that, we’re gonna have to use the word “betrayal,” which I realize sounds really dramatic. I don’t use it lightly, but I think it’s apt.