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Unionized employees at Kickstarter — an online crowdfunding platform — went on strike Thursday, the latest escalation of a months-long contract fight that centers on codifying a four-day workweek and a salary floor of $85,000.
The strike is a milestone for the growing tech worker labor movement.
Tech-worker strikes are very rare, said Emily Mazo, a PhD student at Columbia University who studies labor organizing in the industry.
In 2020, Kickstarter became the first major U.S. tech company to have a “wall-to-wall” union across all non-managerial job titles. After a two-year negotiation, the union, Kickstarter United, ratified its first contract in the summer of 2022.
For the last few years, employees have had a four-day, 32-hour workweek. The crux of the contract fight has been around codifying this provision so that management cannot unilaterally take it away.
“They continue to say, ‘We have no intention of returning to the five-day workweek, but we want to be able to reserve the right to,’” said Dannel Jurado, a senior software engineer at Kickstarter who has worked there for more than six years and has held several union leadership roles. “If you have no intention of it, why do you need to reserve the right?”
Currently, 60 of the 100 employees are members of the union, Jurado said.
Workers are also fighting for a $85,000 minimum salary for all members. Even though Kickstarter became a fully remote company in 2020, many of its employees remain in New York, where it was founded and headquartered, or are based in other cities with a high cost of living, such as Los Angeles or Seattle.
“We still have folks in the company who are living paycheck to paycheck,” said Arleigh Atkinson, a senior software engineer at Kickstarter based in Portland, Ore.
One in six union members currently makes less than $85,000 said Atkinson. Altogether, she estimated it would cost an additional $94,000 annually for Kickstarter. “It’s a drop in the bucket compared to the total budget of the company,” she said.
Kickstarter did not respond to multiple emails and phone calls for comment.
Bargaining started in April, three months before the first contract was set to expire. Since then, the union has won some concessions, including establishing guidelines around the use of artificial intelligence. But after negotiations reached a stalemate, workers voted to strike.
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“The point of all of this is to get an agreement,” said Sam Heyne, a staff organizer with Kickstarter United’s parent union, the Office and Professional Employees International Union (OPEIU) Local 153.
Kickstarter United is part of a wave of tech worker organizing that includes roles like software engineers and product managers. Last November, the New York Times Tech Guild went on a week-long strike, reaching a deal with management a month later.
“It’s a sign of strength of the movement and the maturity of these tech worker unions that they are powerful enough to strike,” said Mazo.
The four-day workweek has become more mainstream in recent years. A study published last July in Nature Human Behavior found that the four-day workweek resulted in improvements in burnout, job satisfaction, mental health and physical health.
“I haven’t seen any other examples of contractual language used to guarantee a four-day workweek, which is why I think this is so exciting,” said Ethan Marcotte, independent designer and author of “You Deserve a Tech Union,” a book about the tech labor movement.
“People may call our demand for a four-day workweek extravagant,” said Jurado, the Kickstarter United organizer based in New York. “People probably said that to the people who wanted the five-day workweek, right?”
Jurado is hopeful that their fight will inspire other workplaces.
“We need to show by example, because I don’t think it’s just going to be handed to us,” he said. “We have to fight. So, we’re going to fight.”
