Tech workers' fight for living wages and a 32-hour workweek is a battle for all

Joan Wright is a rank-and-file member of Kickstarter United and a member of her union’s contract action team. 

Militant labor action and strong picket lines that shut down business profits have always been the most powerful tool working people have to win demands in workplaces and communities. As the gap between the working class and the rich in the U.S. grows wider every year, working people must take bold action against the attacks on labor and living standards. We must rebuild a fighting labor movement willing to fight for bold demands, such as living wages and a 32-hour work week — and demonstrate that we can fight and win.

My union, Kickstarter United, part of the Office and Professional Employees International Union (OPEIU) Local 153, is the union of workers at Kickstarter and the first-ever union in the American tech industry. On Oct. 2, we went on strike over our demands for a 32-hour work week with no loss of pay and livable wages for all workers.

Kickstarter is a crowdfunding platform where large and small businesses and independent creators raise money from customers who back their projects. The company makes profits by taking a 5-percent cut of all money pledged. Our union includes 59 workers like me who provide a range of services to creators and customers, including customer support, marketing, outreach, research, trust and safety and software development for Kickstarter’s platform.

Kickstarter’s founders and its current executives pride themselves on being a “public benefit corporation" to “harness the power of private enterprise to create public benefit.” They also decided to become a “B corporation,” a designation that purports that the business exists “to benefit all people, communities, and the planet.”

Yet none of these designations and labels change the fact that Kickstarter is fundamentally like any other corporation under capitalism. The company makes profits for its wealthy major shareholders on the backs of the labor of its workers. Profits for the bosses of any corporation (both the top executives and the biggest shareholders) originate from paying workers a fraction of the wealth they generate from their labor. Kickstarter revenue is in the tens of millions, while some of its fewer than 100 workers struggle to get by, living paycheck to paycheck.

The major shareholders and investors of Kickstarter include massive venture capital funds and tech billionaires and multi-millionaires. Most recently, Kickstarter received $100 million in funding from the venture capital fund Andreessen Horowitz, founded by Mark Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, tech investors who have donated millions of dollars to Trump-aligned political action committees.

These wealthy interests are now bankrolling the same union-busting playbook as any other corporation against us. To break our strike, Kickstarter management hired the notorious union-busting law firm Littler Mendelson, the same firm used by Amazon and Starbucks. In our initial union drive in 2020, Kickstarter management launched a brutal union-busting campaign and fired union organizers. Now, instead of meeting our demands for living wages, the CEO has announced a new round of jobs hirings internationally, outside of the union, in a blatant attempt to undermine our strike and the union altogether. Externally, the company touts the victories that our union has won as job benefits, and then internally tells us that they can’t pay workers a living wage.

Workers create all the wealth at Kickstarter, just as workers create all wealth in society. There is more than enough wealth for every worker to have a living wage, even for a 32-hour week. Auto workers at Ford, General Motors and Stellantis, who are unionized with the United Auto Workers, demanded a 32-hour-work-week for 40 hours’ pay as part of their historic 2023 strike. This was the union’s boldest demand, and while the auto workers didn’t get that win among their other substantial victories, it was groundbreaking for UAW to have included the demand to help set the sights higher in the entire labor movement. We work to live, we don't live to work!

The labor movement formally won the national eight-hour day and the 40-hour workweek in 1938. But the demands for those standards were initiated decades earlier through a militant fight, including mass strike action led by socialists. Incensed by this working-class victory, the capitalists unleashed violence and repression on the labor movement, resulting in workers being beaten, arrested and tortured, with some even losing their lives. 

The labor movement needed to become  militant to counter this assault by the bosses, and hundreds of thousands of rank-and-file workers played a courageous role.

Now we need to build a similar fighting movement for a 32-hour week and living wages for all workers. The bosses will fight tooth and nail to prevent workers from securing those victories anywhere. The history of the labor movement shows that, in fact, the bosses will never relent in even minor skirmishes, because they understand that working-class victories of any magnitude raise the morale of workers to win even more. They know that when we, the workers, stand together in solidarity, we can win.
Which is why we are calling for broad working-class solidarity in our fight. Anyone can support our strike by signing our petition, donating to our solidarity fund, or joining us on our virtual picket line. We have held online and in-person strike rallies in Seattle and New York. 

Winning our demands and building these into larger mobilizations and mass rallies will require a fighting movement. We urge all tech workers, rank-and-file union members and union leadership across the entire labor movement to join us in building the movement for a 32-hour week and living wages for all workers. If we can win our demands, it will be an unprecedented victory — one that will generate forward momentum for workers everywhere.

Kickstarter bosses and tech industry owners will continue to do anything to break our strike. They know that if we win any of our demands, workers across the tech industry and further afield will get organized and fight for more, beyond even our workplaces. Tech workers have been organizing against the genocide in Gaza, such as with No Tech for Apartheid and in our union local. We should be crystal clear: our fight is an uphill one. Workers in the tech industry are getting hit with layoffs and benefit cuts, despite tech billionaires and multimillionaires making record profits. And this is also precisely why tech workers have to stand up and fight back.