Against Tech Oligarchy: Worker Resistance in the World’s Most Powerful Industry

by JS Tan, Clarissa Redwine

As tech bosses fall in line with fascism, tech workers are fighting back. This is the rousing inside story of their movement—and how it spawned the right-wing, anti-worker backlash now reshaping the industry.

After Donald Trump’s election in 2016, the tech industry sprang into action to oppose his right-wing agenda, with workers staging walkouts against ICE contracts and CEOs joining mass mobilizations against the so-called Muslim ban. But it wasn’t long before the tech bosses started to fall in line with the new administration. Using the autonomy afforded to them by the industry’s progressive and mission-driven culture, tens of thousands of tech workers began speaking out against their own executives. This burgeoning resistance included organizing against military contracts, walkouts to protest sexism, agitation about tech’s role in the climate crisis, and even a wave of union drives. By the early 2020s, tech workers had sparked an exciting movement that seemed to hold the potential to check the industry’s rapid growth and reactionary drift.

But as their struggle grew, so did the employers’ backlash. A new class consciousness took root among the billionaire owners. Hellbent on stamping out any and all dissent, tech executives embraced Trumpism, fired organizers, and began lashing out against the “woke” ideology they blamed for turning their once loyal employees against them.

Against Tech Oligarchy provides a gripping account of this inspiring movement’s development and offers a balance sheet of its successes and failures that will prove crucial for anyone looking to challenge right-wing billionaires anywhere.

Genres: Nonfiction, Technology, Politics, Labor

309 pages, Kindle Edition

Published September 15, 2026

Reviews

[Clara]

Look, I know I'm biased. Clarissa and JS are friends and longtime comrades, and the history they've chronicled here is one that shaped my own organizing life. But I genuinely believe that I'd love the sh*t out of this book even if none of those things were true. It's smart, it's insightful, and it's downright *gripping*. I read the last 150 pages in two sittings, and then only because the battery in my kobo died 50 pages from the end. It's like reading true crime where the crimes are labor violations.

And then, at the end of it all, just when you're wondering where could we possibly go from here, there is so much hope. What more could you want?

[Lucia Huo]

My long-time intuition has been that avoiding the tech industry and its byproducts is the solution to the industry's blatant disregard for its societal impacts -- whether it be about loneliness, carbon emissions, education or any of the other proliferating issues.

This book is illuminating to me, because it challenges this preconception, that the solution is largely to divest from what you don't like. Instead, it takes the optimistic and well-informed view that the way to mitigate the tech industry's societal harms is to leverage the social consciousness of its workers -- whose critical thinking abilities have not died with the mindlessness of their leadership. This book proposes an exciting, novel, and dare I say, productive, solution to a relevant societal issue. Bravo, JS and Clarissa!

[Sandra]

I received a free ARC copy from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

The ARC copy of the book itself had many obvious formatting errors, to my shock. There weren't spaces inbetween various words, and some of the paragraphs were broken midway through their sentences thanks to the citations inbetween some phrases.

Putting the formatting and grammar errors aside, I thought this book did a thorough job in documenting all of the tech workers fighting fascism in the current tech industry over the past ten years. There are many details that I learned from this book that I would not know otherwise since I do not usually follow the news in this industry. However, I wish there were some actionable takeaways as of what the reader could do to support tech workers in the industry. The book lacked having those in place by the end of the book to really sell the overall message of supporting tech workers.

[Charlie]

It seems that every ten years or so, a book comes out about labour relations that defines the struggles of an industry. Against Tech Oligarchy is exactly that, for tech workers. While innovation and growth can move very quickly in the tech sector, the challenges workers face in collective organizing operates at a slower pace, giving this book some staying power. Tan and Redwine share the details of workers organizing across Silicon Valley: Google, Facebook, Amazon, Kickstarter, Mapbox, Twitter, and even the New York Times. This context sets the stage for a series of David vs. Goliath-like showdowns on the stages of everyday departments, town halls, Discord chats, and Slack boards. It made for pretty riveting reading. Some might critique the formatting but we're reviewing eARCs which are not formatted for publication (the front matter says as such but very few people read that)--the published copies of the book and ebooks will be just fine.

Labour relations books in libraries and bookstores tend to get squished into corners of history sections, or occasional one-offs in popular culture. Usually you have to check out academic libraries in order to find more guides and handbooks, the likes of which Jane McAlevey has written or contributed to. Defying the pigeon holes of labour organizing volumes, this book makes a case for the story of big tech as belonging to its workers and not just its founders writing books on innovation, or leadership best practices in the collective imagination of Big Tech. Swaths of new readers will get the chance to learn about the consciousness of the collective good that led to Labour Day, weekends, the 40 hour work week, in addition to benefits and paid vacations. Tan and Redwine don't speak to that history specifically, but as someone who worked at a public library where CUPE was our union (one of Canada's largest and most consequential for politicians), labour relations books remain important to me. Every Labour Day in September, I quietly think that we should rename the holiday to "thank a union organizer day". Keeping all of this in mind, Against Tech Oligarchy is a book you won't want to miss!

One of my biggest takeaways from the book is that tech workers weren't just organizing for their workplace conditions (Amazon and Twitter billionaire tyrants notwithstanding). They were organizing for their right to hold truth to power upon learning that companies like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and more, were creating inequitable conditions in the world. Tech workers were basically fighting for their right to let us know how we were/are being manipulated while thinking we were just being entertained on platforms. I found it fascinating that they weren't bargaining for pay as much as the right to save us from ourselves. One of the things that union-busters talk about are the politics and refer to it loosely as money-grabbing (at least this was what they hammered over our heads for the few minutes of my early 20s that I worked at a few non-bookish stores). But the truth about tech unionizing couldn't be further from the truth, as Tan and Redwine move narrative mountains to demonstrate.

The current pulling you back into the book are the stories of individuals, and the thriller-like speed of the plot in each chapter. You feel like you're in the room with the organizers as the news rolls in during union election eleventh hours. Furthermore, the book is an important case study on whatever comes next in the story of tech organizing. I do wonder whether the tech industry is a canary for other industries where monopolies or conglomerates may see tech owners as giving them permission to act similarly.

Tan and Redwine's book cross-pollenates well, applying beyond collective change through unions. You cannot advocate for meaningful collective change anywhere without using some of the same tactics as the brilliant organizers in this book. It is a bit of a political tome in that sense (not as obviously stated though, as the likes of Run for Something: A Real-Talk Guide to Fixing the System Yourself or Represent: The Woman’s Guide to Running for Office and Changing the World). The union-busting could just as easily apply to a small community/town or city's monied NIMBYs, demagoguery in Regional/Municipal councils or Provincial/Federal government (I'm reviewing from Canada) or even just anti-democratic ideologues with largesse to spare. How do you organize for a collective goal across different kinds of people with competing or at least varied interests, all while under constraints? Against Tech Oligarchy has a few great examples.

I really enjoyed reading this book and I recommend it for anyone looking to learn more about Big Tech's worker resistance. If you were to look at the world, and read other books about the tech industry (or the likes of Peter Thiel therein), hopelessness would be an understandable side effect. Tan and Redwine leave readers with a little more hope. We are reminded that even in the face of the most daunting billionaire power brokers, people power still counts for something significant. If we have one another and a commitment to a cause, we've got something that no amount of money or tyranny can take away. In other words: it's a fait accompli for class consciousness at present.

Thank you to the publisher and authors for the eARC from NetGalley!

If you want some read-a-likes or books to learn more about collective organizing or political mobilization check these titles out:
•Lead from the Outside: How to Build Your Future and Make Real Change
•The Purpose of Power: How We Come Together When We Fall Apart
•Women Winning Office: An Activist's Guide to Getting Elected
•No Shortcuts
•A Collective Bargain: Unions, Organizing, and the Fight for Democracy
•A New Kind of Union: Unifor and the birth of the modern Canadian union

For even more titles, check out this union-ish reader's advisory list compiled by the Strathcona County Library in Canada.

[Rosemary]

This is an interesting book setting out the success and failure of Tech workers to unionise in the USA. The authors have been involved in this themselves and provide first hand accounts of it in various Tech organisations. It is well written and helped me to have a better perspective on the apparent U-turn of some of the owners of large Tech companies on their political allegiances. It also demonstrated to me the severe challenge of anyone standing up to those with extreme wealth. There are positive moments and definite successes including the collaboration between traditional Tech workers and those working in more manual roles (eg: in the warehouses). I was also appalled to learn of the environmental impact of the data centres used by the Tech organisations and the lack of concern that the US government seems to show for these. The book highlighted a number of ethical concerns in the use of data by Tech organisations and the danger of the lack of regulation or requirement for governance or review. I was not initially sure about the title but it became apparent as I read that this is absolutely what the owners of the largest Tech organisations have become. The book is a good read if you want to get a better understanding of how the Tech organisations operate (although there will be some who do not demonstrate such behaviours), have an interest in Labour law and a reiteration that extreme wealth often means that individuals seem to be able to operate in the way that they choose. I would have liked to have read clearer recommendations from the authors as to how the workers in the Tech industry and more broadly, the wider population can continue to appropriately challenge the Tech oligarchy.

I was gifted a free copy of this book by Netgalley in return for an objective review.

[Minsoo Thigpen]

There are many books about the tech industry, especially from the perspectives of founders and the tech elites. But what makes this story compelling is that it’s a story of the tech industry by the workers who made it into what it is today, and organized when they felt that their companies, which they joined with idealism and do-good energy, were straying from their missions and bending to market forces and a government that was quickly descending into fascism.

Every tech worker should and must read this. Not only are the stories in here the ones that live in many people’s memories (the Google walkouts, the open letters and protests) but they’ve finally been written down and canonized. But not only that, there’s rich analysis of the political economy of the tech industry and how it impacted its labor relations. The book is at once hopeful and urgent, emphasizing how tech workers have yet to understand their worker power and leverage, and how in a world of quickly automating white collar work—- if we can figure out how tech workers can strike at the heart of power when the product of their labor is automation, then it becomes the playbook for all workers in the age of AI who are inadvertently impacted by the world’s most powerful industry.

[Ben]

I received an advanced copy and yes, am slightly biased as JS is an old friend, but I really did learn a lot about the past, present, and possible futures of the tech industry. As a tech worker, I think this was a valuable book to learn more about the context of how our workplace got to where it is today, and as a member of US and global society, I think it was valuable to learn more about how these super powerful people came to hold, maintain, and exert that power.
The book also helped clearly illuminate and trace some causes of the political shift in tech executive politics over the last decade.
My big question at the end of the book was this: what next? What can, or should, tech employees do to shape the world in a positive way, whether inside or outside the workplace?

[Jimmy]

The past decade's tech worker movement has been in dire need of a comprehensive retrospective told by and for workers and organizers. There are only one or two handfuls of people qualified to write such a chronicle, and JS Tan and Clarissa Redwine are among them. They do so masterfully in this book, delivering a clearly periodized history of the movement and a compelling analysis of movement strategy that's useful for organizers.

[Shwetha]

The book held my attention in some places but overall it wasn't anything new . If you're in the tech industry most of this book events was in the news or you've already heard of it. With AI the idea of a worker resistance in tech is not very feasible. Capitalism is not democratic so I don't see the point of this book.

[Venneh]

This is a great overview of several recent unionization campaigns in the tech industry, and how they succeeded and failed both, and what we can take from their campaigns as we try to increase unionization in the ongoing American job market hellscape.

[Aditi]

Ty to the author for sending me a copy. This is a good book, should be read by workers in tech.

[Nadeen]

The emergence of union organizing in tech, and how growing public backlash against the tech industry impacted workers and tech companies.