Introduction
In an online newsletter dating from March 2000, the sociologist Ursula Huws noted that ‘recent work has raised in a very acute form the problem of how to name the kinds of work which involve telematics’ (Huws, 2001:2). She argued that traditional terms such as ‘white collar’, ‘non-manual’ and ‘office work’ did not seem satisfactory to describe these forms of technology-related work, which led her to discuss terms such as teleworker, telecommuter, digital analyst, knowledge worker, information processor, e-worker and information worker (Huws, 2001:3). None of the terms were convincing to Huws. In her influential text ‘The making of a cybertariat?’ (2001), she picked up these proposals and pointed to the re-composition of workforces, including through the IT industry in India, whose potential for a renewed labour conflict led her to propose the term cybertariat as a contemporary form of worker subjectivity in the making (Huws, 2001:20). Twenty-five years later, both the arguments and open questions of Huws’ article remain current. The difficulty of describing work and workers in an economy that increasingly circles around virtual, software-driven work practices and changing business models has remained in debates on the digital economy until today. It reflects the challenge of grasping the ‘fluid state’ (Marx, 1976:103) of class and class-making. The tensions between descriptive, occupational, or advertisement-derived terminologies on the one hand versus political, class-oriented terminologies on the other hand are indicative of this challenge (Huws & Dahlmann, 2009).
Among the most recent of such terms is ‘tech worker’, often associated with white-collar workers in today’s start-up economy or (Big) Tech firms. In media reporting and academic accounts, tech workers are associated with professions such as software developers, data analysts or product designers in the offices of firms like Google or Amazon, or their various subcontractors (Robertson, 2022; Coleman, 2022; Tan, Nedzhvetskaya & Mazo, 2023). They are also associated with the start-up economy and smaller, more recent firms on the market. Usually, the picture of the tech worker is that of an office worker tasked with the development, maintenance or distribution of digital platform infrastructure, machine learning systems and data collection (Dorschel, 2022a, Rothstein, 2022, Tan, Nedzhvetskaya & Mazo, 2023). If defined as ICT professionals, tech workers made up 4.6 percent of total employment in the EU in 2020, and 9.9 percent of total employment in the United States in 2016 (Rothstein, 2022:5). On a descriptive level, tech workers appear to resemble employees in the IT industry tied to lean, agile office management systems (Moore, 2018), and accustomed to a highly turbulent, contingent market structured by venture capital and its subsequent circles of either capital-heavy investments and hypergrowth or sudden bankruptcies, layoffs and product cancellations (Shestakofsky, 2024; Cooiman, 2022). 1 To sum up, in these accounts the term relates to specific working activities and a particular environment or place of work.
However, the figure of the tech worker has also developed as a political imaginary. Here, it stands in contrast to the figure of the professional, the engineer or the creative (Tarnoff, 2020:6), which for decades has been evoked by management and corporations, reflecting the discourse of Californian ideology or ‘artistic critique’ within work life (Barbrook & Cameron, 1996; Hepp, Schmitz & Schneider, 2023; Boltanski & Chiapello, 2007). Before being picked up by the media and then later by academics, the term tech worker in its current understanding developed in the 2010s in the United States, from 2016 on as a reaction to the Trump presidency, the involvement of Big Tech firms in election fraud and incidents of workplace power abuse in tech firms (Tarnoff & Weigel, 2021; Jaffe, 2021; Boag et al, 2022). The notion of the tech worker thus evolved with an emphasis on its worker subjectivity, and the observation that even white-collar employees in prestigious technology firms are exploited workers in an economy geared towards the profit of managerial elites and shareholders at the cost of dignified work, liberal democracy and ecological stability (Marcotte, 2023).
Although ‘tech worker’ has become a popular term, its meaning remains somewhat vague. This is mainly due to the fact that the tech worker movement itself has expanded the meaning of the term over time, eventually embracing the use of the term ‘tech worker’ for every worker in a tech company, from programmers to maintenance and cafeteria staff (Jaffe, 2021; McCreery, 2024). Academic researchers, in turn, have focused mostly on the status of tech workers as affluent or privileged workers (Dorschel, 2022a; Selling & Strimling, 2023), with some describing them as antagonists to lower-paid workforces (Burrell & Fourcade, 2021).
The aim of this article is to contribute to the question of how the term ‘tech worker’ should be understood and used in academic research, and what value it holds for actors such as trade unions, civil society and the public. I aim to make sense of the vague and sometimes contradictory use of the term, both in literature and in the field. The article builds on an analysis of literature on the topic as well as on findings from fieldwork I have conducted among workers, union organisers and experts in Germany and the United States. The article begins with a brief literature overview, mostly of terms used for white-collar workers in the IT sector over time. It then explores in a more systematic manner the term ‘tech worker’, namely its development as a political terminology within the labour movement, and, in a subsequent step, the academic debate and certain definitory proposals. The article advances three principal arguments. First, that the term is generally useful for an understanding of work in the digital economy today; second, that it is justified to see tech workers as white-collar workers in academic analysis; and third, that such an analysis should acknowledge the political nature of the term, which is central to its meaning and value. The article closes with some final remarks on the remaining open questions.
State of the research
White-collar work in the IT industry, as well as its conflicts, has been a topic of analysis since the establishment of the sector in the 1980s. In a 1986 report for Labor Research Review, union organisers describe the workplace problems and organising activities of ‘high tech workers’ (Early & Wilson, 1986) in both production facilities and offices of Silicon Valley and other tech industry hubs in the United States, a term also used in Gideon Kunda’s influential analysis of work in a high-tech corporation (Kunda, 1991). Throughout the 1990s, as companies like Windows and Intel rose and both capital volume and the size of the IT labour market grew, terms such as immaterial worker, the networker, the creative class or the hacker class became part of the academic debate (Hardt & Negri, 2001; Castells, 1996; Florida, 2002; Wark, 2004). Most of these definitions focus on high-wage white-collar workers, although critical accounts also mention other groups or layers (Dyer-Witheford, 2015:65), from more precarious ones down to a programming proletariat or even net slaves (Lessard & Baldwin, 2000).
Such analyses of IT professionals often built on earlier research on engineers, technicians, and office employees more generally, which had become a considerable part of labour markets in many industrialised nations after the Second World War (Goldthorpe et al, 1969; Braverman, 1971; Bell, 1973). Studies of the knowledge economy highlighted its increasing economic and cultural importance (Machlup, 1962), and were later also taken up to theorise the figure of the knowledge worker (Mosco & McKercher, 2008). In the context of debates on white-collar work and technicians, critical sociologists like Serge Mallet and Andre Gorz brought the issue of class into the debate, and raised the question of whether a ‘new working class’ was being formed through a proletarianisation of engineers and other office workers (Mallet, 1975; Crompton & Jones, 1984).
In the 1990s, sociologists Barbrook and Cameron (1996) described the ambivalent working profiles of the ‘virtual class’ (Kroker &Weinstein, 1994) of developers, engineers and computer scientists that increasingly formed in Silicon Valley at the time, and who ‘experience the rewards and insecurities of the marketplace’ (Barbrook & Cameron, 1996:15) at the same time. They remark that
on the one hand, these digital artisans not only tend to be well-paid, but also have considerable autonomy over their pace of work and place of employment … Yet, on the other hand, these skilled workers are tied by the terms of their contracts and have no guarantee of continued employment. (Barbrook & Cameron, 1996: 15)
To some extent, this description remains up-to-date in debates, self-descriptions and media coverage to today. From 2000 onwards, several researchers also debated the issue of unpaid ‘digital labour’ taking place on the web, leading to debates around a re-definition of established notions of value, exploitation and work (Terranova, 2000; Scholz, 2013; Fuchs, 2013). Well into the 2010s, the surge in call-centre work through the proliferation of ICT was discussed, along with its implications for occupational identities (Huws, 2009; Huws & Dahlmann, 2009). Since the 2010s, the rise of a platform economy with low-paid worker groups like gig workers or app workers in delivery and ride-hailing as well as crowdworkers working from home have also emerged as a focus of attention (Berg et al, 2018; Huws, Spencer & Coates, 2019; Mezzadra et al, 2024).
The current debate on tech workers evolved in parallel with the rise of (Big) Tech corporations after the financial crisis of 2008, when the already influential investments in the industry rose in terms of scale, capital and infrastructural capacity (Srnicek, 2016; Staab, 2024). The development of the term ‘tech worker’ is tied to a political movement that became prominent from 2017 onwards and eventually evolved into a more global phenomenon. More recently, social scientists have picked up the term and tried to tie it to particular forms of worker or class subjectivity, specifically in relation to employees ‘who earn high salaries for programming, designing or managing digital technologies and digitally mediated services’ (Dorschel, 2022a:2). While some of these authors have remained agnostic about the meaning of the term, others present precise analytical definitions. In many cases, their terms differ from those used in the political sphere and organising efforts.
The aim of the next sections is twofold. First, I want to shed more light on the development of the term tech worker and the different uses of this term in the political, public and academic spheres. I highlight how the term tech is evolving as a political tool and the ways that its meaning is shaped by the labour movement and workers, an aspect that rarely applies to other terms. Second, I evaluate the relevance and significance of the term, and formulate a brief proposal for researchers on how to understand and use it. My analysis is based on literature analysis, but also on a preliminary analysis of ethnographic fieldwork and interviews among tech workers in Germany and the United States. The empirical data is the result of a 14-month ethnographic study among organised tech workers in Berlin, Germany, which included conferences, social gatherings, union events and festivals. During this time, I also conducted 40 qualitative interviews with tech workers, organisers and local experts as well as organised gig workers. In the United States, I conducted ethnographic fieldwork in New York and San Francisco during a 4-month research stay and conducted 10 interviews with unionised tech workers and union organisers from across the United States.
The term ‘tech worker’
The political movement
The contemporary use of the term tech worker originated in the United States, where it came into widespread use among workers, organisers and the broader public from 2017 on (Tarnoff & Weigel, 2021; Jaffe, 2021). Its ascendence coincided with protests against the election of Donald Trump in late 2016 and with the intensification of existing conflicts over military contracts and workplace equity measures (Tiku, 2019; Hanna, 2020; Jaffe, 2021:5f.). These mobilisations represented a culmination of two developments: first, the concrete dangers and political leverage of Big Tech companies manifested at this time; and second, ongoing labour conflicts in the tech industry (Nedzhvetskaya & Tan; 2024). A meeting between the Trump administration and six Big Tech executives in late 2016 highlighted both the importance of the tech industry and their lack of responsibility, especially against the background of election manipulation that had taken place via social media websites. Policies like a Muslim registry, a visa ban for majority-Muslim countries and the threat of mass deportations became a concrete occasion both for a public ‘techlash’ and for mobilisations within the workforce of tech companies, many of which had previously projected themselves to employees as caring and progressive corporations (Tiku, 2019; Marcotte, 2023). These rather immediate grievances and concerns came on top of a development of labour struggles that had already taken place in the lower-paid layers of tech companies, such as security guards, cafeteria staff and shuttle drivers, who had organised with service sector unions at Silicon Valley firms (Tarnoff, 2020:14). Even in the higher-paid layers of the industry, there had for a while been growing tensions over the rising costs of living, especially rent prices, which contributed to a broad sense of insecurity among workers in tech companies.
This range of grievances led to a variety of collective actions from 2016 onwards. Initiatives or campaigns like Tech Solidarity and Tech Workers Coalition were established or gained momentum, several thousand workers signed a ‘Never Again Pledge’ and walkouts were staged against a Muslim registry and planned mass deportations (Tiku, 2019; Tarnoff, 2020:21; Jaffe, 2021). In early 2017, in Silicon Valley the Tech Workers Coalition cooperated with two service sector unions to support security guards and cafeteria workers in tech companies. A year later, workers at Google started a global walkout against management, reaching 20,000 participants, and the company was also pressured to cancel a military contract with the Pentagon in the United States. In 2019, the first successful unionisation campaigns in companies occurred: at the Kickstarter company in New York, and later also at sub-contracting companies such as HCL in Pittsburgh (Gwin, 2023). While unions and protest actions were not uncommon in most sectors, they were unprecedented on this scale in the tech industry.
These political developments accompanied a rising consciousness among white-collar workers, primarily software engineers, who started to adopt ‘the idea that tech’s full-time office employees were also workers’ (Tarnoff, 2019:16). For many employees, this meant considering their work relationship less as the labour of ‘professionals, creatives, or entrepreneurs’ (Tarnoff, 2019:16) and more as waged labour in a critical sense: dependent, alienated, and exploited (Tiku, 2019). Instead of being seen as the result of self-determination or futuristic progress, it became more obvious at this time that products and services were often produced at the expense of other workers, public infrastructure, and the environment.
This shift in (self-)perception also became clear during my fieldwork within organised tech worker collectives. Sarah, 2 a 32-year-old software developer in Berlin, told me that over the course of her career at tech firms in the United States and Germany, she had grown more and more frustrated with the unwillingness of management to resolve conflicts between employees or harassment by co-workers.
My evolution was kind of like, the next job, another job, something really shitty happened to someone at work … and the next day I quit because I was so fed up with everything that was happening. (Interview June 9, 2023)
After connecting with friends and co-workers in 2019, some of whom wanted to organise a works council, she also started to consider herself more as a worker.
We had, you know, late night … kitchen conversations being like, tech workers are workers too. This kind of gut feeling of like, that feels like the only way. (Interview June 9, 2023)
Other tech workers interviewed during my fieldwork highlighted the experience of powerlessness during layoffs, or being forced to sacrifice the quality of the products they worked on to increase the company’s stock market valuation. Adam, a 36-year-old software engineer in Berlin, told me that ‘You start seeing how it’s very easy for tech companies to build things not to solve a user’s problem … but rather to get more investors’ (Interview May 8, 2023). These and other experiences of lacking agency, meaning, and power in the workplace were frequently mentioned by workers in my interviews and ethnographic observations, and likely served as starting points for organising drives.
The public story of the tech worker movement revolves very much around software engineers and the ambiguity of their structural importance on the one hand and vulnerability in the form of layoffs, harassment, overwork, outsourcing and temp work on the other. However, over time, protagonists of the movement increasingly emphasised the crucial notion that it is not just white-collar workers, but also low-income service workers at their companies who should be considered tech workers. 3 The initiator of Tech Solidarity remarked in 2017 that:
We’re starting to understand the definition of tech worker a bit more broadly. Workers at Amazon aren’t just the people who write the code or run Amazon Web Services. They’re also the pickers in the warehouses – those are also tech workers. (Cegłowski, 2017)
Politically, such realisations paved the way for approaches of ‘wall-to-wall’ organising that encompass all workers of a company. Most prominently, this strategy was used in the ‘pre-majority’ union-building model of the Alphabet Workers Union (AWU) at Google, which was founded in January 2021 (McCreery, 2024).
Conceptually, all these developments established two arguments that became prevalent in US tech organising and connected to the term tech worker: first, the realisation that employees in tech firms are wage-dependent workers, even in the higher-paid and prestigious layers; second, that the notion of the tech worker is a strategic tool that can function as an umbrella for a whole range of occupations and wage-layers in the sector. 4 One interviewee in the United States told me, like many others, that ‘if you work in and around tech in any capacity, that makes you a tech worker’ (Interview February 17, 2024). During a teach-in by a San Francisco-based tech worker campaign I attended, this notion was even extended to technology users, highlighting the exploitation of ‘free labour’ or the dependencies tied to the (obligatory) use of digital technology. Another interviewee in Germany emphasised the specificity of coalitional work for the movement, stating,
that we want to work together with other worker groups is maybe the one thing that justifies calling the tech worker movement a new thing. Because engineers have organised since a long time. But they have not opened themselves for other groups in this way. (Interview August 13, 2023)
While there are historical precedents for such coalitions, the popular focus on them appears indeed to be a specific feature of the contemporary tech worker movement.
Such framings of the tech worker spread across the labour movement and beyond the United States. From 2018 on, groups like Tech Workers Coalition were established across the Western world and appeared in places as diverse as India, Brazil, the United Kingdom, Italy and Germany. Some of these initiatives remained temporary, while others consolidated and built ties to unions, local associations and other movements. In China, tech workers organised as part of the 996.ICU campaign 5 against extensive working hours, and in India new unions for tech workers formed in addition to already existing ones (Roy, 2021). Especially in English-speaking countries, the notion of the tech worker was also picked up by the media, particularly in the (more recent) context of layoffs – implying structural privilege, but also precarity (Marcotte, 2023). While attention was paid to the notion of higher-salaried employees as dependent workers, the broad notion of tech worker was mostly glossed over. So while the initial (and politically strategic) use of tech worker was not translated in the same sense everywhere, it did lead to the establishment of a public imaginary of precarious white-collar workers, a notion that was effective in highlighting a trend towards precarisation of office jobs, and overlapped with discourses concerning occupational insecurity and the rising costs of living. It became a symbolic term for the contradictory paths of downwards social mobility, and an umbrella term for organising campaigns.
Academic analysis
Academic researchers started employing the term tech worker more or less simultaneously with its introduction in the political and public spheres. From around 2019, studies in the social sciences picked up the term to describe white-collar employees in the tech industry or workers performing tech-related work (Rothstein, 2019; Thaa, 2020; Brophy & Grayer, 2021; Roy, 2021; Dorschel, 2022a; Steinhoff, 2022; Selling & Strimling, 2023; Sheehan & Williams, 2023; Niebler, 2023a; Tan, Nedzhvetskaya & Mazo, 2023; Browne, Drage & McInerney, 2024; Wu, 2024). These studies tend to focus explicitly on high-paid, technical professions, and the term is used rather interchangeably with words like ‘IT professional’, ‘software engineer’ or ‘software worker’ that were characteristic of earlier studies. 6 Research on IT professionals has been subject to a wide array of studies over recent decades (see, for example, Xiang, 2006; Gill, 2007; Marks & Scholarious, 2007; Upadhya & Vasavi, 2008; Moore & Taylor, 2009; Bergvall-Kåreborn & Howcroft, 2013; Poster, 2013; Dyer-Witheford, 2015; Neff, 2015; Amrute, 2016), which raise the question whether the term tech worker describes a new paradigm or merely reflects the hunger for new terminologies in academia.
Academic studies of tech workers often work with an implied understanding of the term, but employ different definitions of it. Reflecting on this difficulty, Rothstein remarks that ‘just as autoworkers propelled the Detroit model, tech workers propel the Silicon Valley model, but defining tech workers can be tricky’ (Rothstein, 2022:4). While tech workers are almost always considered to be white-collar employees in scientific studies 7 (in contrast to the above-mentioned use in political movements), there is no consensus as to which white-collar workers are considered to be tech workers. Are they to be defined through an occupational lens – by their technology-related skills and labour process? Or through a sectoral lens – by the industry they work in? (Rothstein, 2022: 4f; Huws & Dahlmann, 2009). There are rather broad definitions, which describe them as ‘knowledge workers with high labour market power in high-tech industries’ (Tan, Nedzhvetskaya & Mazo, 2023:1), as well as narrower task-related ones which see them as those ‘who earn high salaries for programming, designing or managing digital technologies and digitally mediated services’ (Dorschel, 2022a:289; also Rothstein, 2022:7). Some studies also point to the ‘inscription power’ (Dorschel, 2022a:302) of tech workers as a defining feature, referring to their power to shape technological infrastructures (Wajcman, 2018; Thaa et al, 2024). In a quantitative study, Selling and Strimling (2023:4) differentiate between several types of workers in and outside of the tech industry, three of which appear relevant here: first, tech professionals in tech firms 8 (such as software engineers at Google), second, tech professionals in non-tech firms (such as software engineers at General Motors); and third, non-tech professionals at tech firms (such as accountants, financial analysts or technical support at Amazon). While the first group is always included and resembles the prototype picture of a tech worker, the other two categories are sometimes included (for example, Ziegler, 2022; Browne, Drage & McInerney, 2024) and sometimes not. To some extent, such differentiations are also tied to the question of how a tech company is defined – a task that is not always easy or clear-cut. 9
Summing up these approaches, it can be concluded that there is consensus in most of the academic literature on three major aspects that define a tech worker: first, their labour process is defined by cognitive labour (or white-collar work), usually based on professionalised training of some sort; second, their work is concerned with the development or maintenance of software, as well as technological infrastructures related to it; and third, tech workers possess high marketplace power, which means that they can generate above-average incomes and are less susceptible to managerial pressure than other groups due to their possibility to change jobs. Deriving from these three aspects, studies usually ascribe a certain importance or authority to tech workers. This importance stems on the one hand from the characteristics described above (knowledge, professionalism and exit options), but on the other hand from the role of tech companies, especially Big Tech companies, in the global political economy (Niebler, 2023a:61). The latter aspect, in particular, adds a contemporary element to the figure of the tech worker, who to some extent symbolises the immense rise of power of software or platform companies (Graham & Ferrari, 2022). The characteristics described here also imply who is not a tech worker in academic studies: place-based gig workers like food couriers, technical maintenance staff, or social media content creators, who mainly use digital infrastructures.
The research findings on contemporary tech workers, their class positions and their subjectivities differ widely. Some studies tend to exceptionalise tech workers as affluent progressives, assigning to them a ‘post-neoliberal subjectivity’ (Dorschel, 2022b) or anti-establishment values (Selling & Strimling, 2023) to them. In a similar vein, tech workers have been conceptualised as part of a ‘coding elite’ (Burrell & Fourcade, 2021) and as quasi-antagonists of low-wage workers. Conversely, some studies have highlighted the declining living and working standards of many tech workers, which they interpret as representing a proletarisation, precarisation or downward mobility of the workforce (Bergvall-Kåreborn & Howcroft, 2013; Steinhoff, 2022; Wu, 2024; Papadantonakis, 2025). Other studies emphasise the professional ‘engineering ethos’ (Thaa et al, 2024) of IT employees, often related to ethical considerations (Ustek-Spilda, Powell & Nemorin, 2019; Di, 2023; Browne, Drage & McInerney, 2024; Boag et al, 2022) or performance culture (Bialski, 2024). Although some authors lament the lack of attention paid to white-collar software professionals, none of the empirical material in these studies suggests that tech workers comprise a new or unprecedented phenomenon as such. However, there has clearly been a renewed interest in work and class in the tech industry in recent years.
Lastly, it is notable that while academic debates on tech workers have largely upheld the picture of the affluent software engineer, earlier research on the ICT sector and the knowledge economy have discussed the challenges of defining tech-related work and its political aspects in a more systematic manner. Huws and Dahlmann (2009) show how the multi-layered value chains of the computer industry have created problems for occupational identities and class formation since the 1960s (Huws & Dahlmann, 2009:3f). In Laboring Communication (2008), Mosco and McKercher differentiate between narrow, expansive and extended concepts of knowledge labour, and argue that political arguments and a consideration of the value chains of knowledge work are important for an appropriate definition of knowledge workers (Mosco & McKercher, 2008:23–53; Fuchs, 2024:128). 10 Such arguments remain helpful and productive for the debate on tech workers (and resemble them to some extent), while illustrating that definitory distinctions do not need to be made solely on occupational grounds.
Negotiating contingency and the dynamic of class-making
This section discusses the analysis above and derives three related arguments from it. First, I conclude that although the term does not describe a new group of workers and is used in several different ways, the term tech worker can improve our ability to understand labour relations in the digital economy. Second, I argue that although the understanding of tech workers as white-collar workers seems accurate for the time being, researchers should refrain from understanding them as an overly narrow group of elite employees. Third, I propose that researchers should also acknowledge the political meaning of the term and its ongoing, dynamic meaning-making to avoid a static and restricted understanding of the term.
As the analysis above has shown, the term tech worker does not describe something new as such, but rather a shift in the self-understanding of workers in the tech industry and beyond. The term is framed differently in the political and academic spheres, sometimes to a great extent. Given their different field logics and objectives, this is understandable: while organisers, movements and unions use the term as a tool to expand working-class unity, academic researchers have mostly aimed to frame tech workers as an occupational group. This difference creates spaces for misunderstanding. Still, it is important to highlight what makes the term fruitful for an analysis of the digital economy today. First, the term tech worker holds a certain analytical value, highlighting the (subordinate) wage labour relationship of employees, in stark contrast to profession-related or management-assigned titles such as change manager, product manager, data scientist or IT professional, all of which conceal a relationship of dependency within the work. It also reflects the politicised shift in (self-)perception within the industry and beyond. Secondly, the term holds epistemic value, in the sense that it relates to an increasingly common self-description of workers in the industry and beyond. In contrast to more scientific terms such as ‘cognitive worker’ or ‘immaterial worker’, it reflects the lived experiences of workers, the ‘raw material and experience in consciousness’ (Thompson, 1966:9) present in class-making processes. To some extent, the term also reflects a transformation within the industry from a promising, at times mystifying, new sector into a mainstream field in today’s labour markets (Christian, 2024). These analytical and epistemic advantages make the term useful for researchers, workers and unions as well as the general public, seeming to render it more suitable than other terms.
Still, the question remains how researchers should make sense of these different meanings. Should academics adapt to a wide understanding of the term in their analyses? Or should they insist on a clearly defined, more narrow understanding? From the earlier analyses, arguments for either case are imaginable. However, what appears to make the debate on tech workers specifically relevant is these workers’ ‘proximity to authority’ (Bain & Price, 1983:50), whether this stems from their position, their technical skills, their marketplace value or their inscription power. It is their role as a potentially strategic (collective) actors that justifies much of the analysis and the attention given to them (Molinari, 2020). This, in my view, makes the argument for tech workers as white-collar workers in a broad sense most convincing. In this understanding, tech workers are office workers with middle or high incomes in tech companies or with tech-related tasks in a company. While this is more or less in line with many academic accounts of the term, it is also in conflict with accounts that see tech workers as merely a group of elite programmers, as well as those that include rather precarious white-collar jobs in or related to tech, such as certain low-level data scientists, product managers, helpdesk office workers or customer support agents. At the same time, it is an argument against the maximalist, an all-encompassing notion often used by many labour activists, which, at least for academic analysis, can risk being so broad as to become an empty signifier. 11 I draw this conclusion also based on my exchanges with organised gig workers during my fieldwork, most of whom emphatically rejected the notion of seeing themselves as tech workers, even in cases of coalitional-building work and mutual solidarity with white-collar workers (Niebler, 2023b).
In whatever ways researchers choose to employ the term, it seems that they should avoid defining it in relation to purely analytical or abstract categories, and instead acknowledge its political, and therefore historically contingent, nature. As this analysis has shown, the term tech worker has evolved through a political process of meaning-making within the labour movement. While the term does indeed bear analytical value and is useful on a descriptive level, researchers should acknowledge its embeddedness in the dynamic and complex logic of class (re-)composition and class-making (Alquati, 1975). This also implies a need to see the historical contingency and dynamic of the term and its potential for encompassing different groups over time. Such a dynamic is exemplified, for instance, in the case of YouTube Music content operators in Austin, Texas, who fought Google as well as their subcontractor Cognizant together with the Alphabet Workers Union in 2023 and 2024 (Battle, 2024). The content operators are outsourced white-collar workers with low salaries and little bargaining power, a far cry from many of the prestigious software engineers who symbolised the tech workers movement in 2017. Nevertheless, both in popular media reporting and in common understanding, these workers appear to constitute part of the category that it is legitimate to classify a tech worker today (Cassauwers, 2023; Ivanova & Berger, 2024). On the other hand, there are other groups or contexts or work profiles (for example, accountants, human resources or sales workers) where such a term might seem less convincing. Researchers should be aware of this (historical) contingency, which not only applies to the term tech worker, but to class-related terminology more generally (Thompson, 1966).
Conclusion
This article has traced back the divergent use of the term tech worker in politics and academia. The term is among the more recent in a long line of attempts to frame work, occupation, and class in the digital economy. Popularised through the US labour movement, tech worker evolved as a self-description of white-collar employees and was then gradually expanded to other workers in lower-status groups through campaigns. Academic researchers have worked with the term in a rather static way and have attempted to define it, sometimes considering only an exclusive fraction of white-collar workers.
This article has argued that although the term tech worker does not describe a historically new category of worker, it can be helpful for a critical analysis of work in digital capitalism, due to the analytical and epistemic value other terms often lack. Regarding the use of the term for the social sciences, I suggest that it should be used broadly for white-collar workers in the tech industry or tech-related jobs in other companies. This argues against both overly narrow and overly broad definitions of the term, avoiding both the risk of singling out certain high-wage workers in an exceptional fashion and, conversely, that of turning the term into an empty signifier that encompasses too vague a group of workers. Most importantly, however, it is necessary to caution against an overly static understanding of the term; scholars are recommended to take seriously the notion of class as a historical, contingent relationship in the making. This does not preclude the possibility that a reassessment of the term tech worker might be necessary at some point. Also, while existing research (including mine in Germany) indicates that the term has been adopted beyond the English-speaking sphere, different understandings in national or regional contexts are likely and should be considered.
While it remains open how fruitful the term tech worker will be for an understanding of class, labour and the digital economy, its wider usage today reflects the changing (self-)perception of work in the industry and should be acknowledged as such. It is not by coincidence that these shifts and discussions gain momentum in times of crisis, as Huws’ ‘The making of a cybertariat’ did in the middle of the dot-com bubble burst, and as the tech worker debate did during a political crisis in 2017. The impact and effects of this would make an interesting topic for research in the upcoming years, which might range from investigating developments of transnational class-making (Nussbaum Bitran et al, 2023), reconfigurations of management, employer strategies and the re-composition of workforces in the face of machine learning technologies (Pasquinelli, 2023), to exploring the phenomenon of ‘class traitors’ (Sherman, 2021) in the workplace and beyond. In researching these developments, researchers should be sensitive to the fact that they are active participants in the meaning-making of such terminology and reflect on and discuss their role in it.