Kaitlin Cort left software engineering and started What We Will in February to help technology workers navigate layoffs, negotiate severance, seek basic income while unemployed, learn new skills and organize unions. The center has worked with Amazon employees concerned about rapid AI adoption, workers cut from Oracle and Meta employees discussing workplace surveillance. These are concrete attempts to build bargaining power, not proof of an industry-wide union wave. [1]
The organizing effort advances the paper's July 11 finding that entry tasks can disappear before whole professions. That account placed responsibility on employers to rebuild the training ladder when automation removes routine junior work. Sunday's reporting asks the next question: whether workers can negotiate the rules, support and distribution of gains when management controls adoption. [1]
That is a different job from preserving individual craft. The companion story about engineers coding personal projects without AI concerns skill retention, judgment and the pleasure of making software by hand. This article concerns severance, monitoring, training, standards and who bears transition costs. A worker can sharpen every technical skill available and still lack the authority to set a workplace surveillance rule or bargain over a layoff.
The Guardian spoke with more than a dozen engineers and experts who described layoffs, underemployment, pressure to use AI and uncertainty about the profession. That interview set gives texture and named examples; it is not a representative survey of software workers. It cannot establish how many engineers support unionization, whether AI caused each reported layoff or how organizing rates vary by employer, seniority, visa status or geography. [1]
Cort said What We Will receives at least 10 applications a day and that requests specifically concerning unionization have increased. Those figures remain her account, not an audited membership series. The reported campaigns likewise show activity rather than outcome: the source does not establish union recognition at Amazon, a changed severance policy at Oracle or an enforceable surveillance agreement at Meta. [1]
The distinction between activity and victory is not pedantry. Technology employers can require new tools, measure performance, reorganize teams and cut jobs through management decisions. Collective action seeks a counterparty able to negotiate those decisions. Whether a campaign ultimately wins, the subject is workplace power rather than a career coach's advice to acquire another certification.
The measure of progress should therefore be institutional: recognized representation, written adoption standards, enforceable monitoring limits, funded training, severance terms and published outcomes. Daily applications may show demand for help, but only those receipts can show whether interest changes the terms under which engineers work or leave.
No separate collective-action X status was verified. The only adjacent receipt, an April Andrew Ng post, discusses coding agents, product management, team structure and junior education; it is too old for publication in either companion story. Even if current, reusing it here would imply that an expert post about how software is built supplies evidence about layoffs, underemployment or organizing that it does not contain.
What We Will is young, and its campaigns have not yet supplied contracts, election results or measured employment effects. That is the boundary, not a reason to dismiss the story. Engineers who were told that adaptation was an individual duty are beginning to ask who can set shared rules. Reskilling may help a person review AI-written code; it cannot by itself negotiate severance, constrain surveillance or decide who receives the productivity gain.
-- ANNA WEBER, Berlin