By Nick Scott, Director, Trade Union AI, Unions 21 | 6 min
I run AI training courses for union staff. A very common thing I hear in this training is union staff who want their employers to avoid AI: they don’t want to use big tech tools owned by people who represent so much of what they’re fighting against.
"The tech giants seem to have launched an offensive against individual freedoms and the rule of law… In the past, these companies have already shown significant hostility toward unions and the employees within their own organizations." — syndicom, Switzerland, 2025
It’s a very understandable position, and one I sympathise with.
Yet their employers, unions, are overwhelmingly using big tech tools. This isn't hypocrisy. It's that alternatives are hard to find, hard to assess, and hard to justify to a committee that is rightly careful with members' money. It’s also that for most staff a tool arrives already bundled into software the union has bought anyway. (It’s no surprise that Microsoft Copilot is the most commonly used AI tool by union staff – used by 58% of the union staff who told us which AI tools they use in our union staff AI survey).
It makes no sense to ask whether unions should use big tech. They already do. Instead we should ask: is there a union-friendly alternative to big tech, and how can unions best access it and support it?
It’s a question that has never been more pressing, because never before have two things been so clear:
The links between big tech and the kinds of power structures unions fight against. All the big tech moguls were guests of honour at Trump’s inauguration, after all.
The way that hostile actors (the far right being a clear example) are becoming incredibly adept at using technology (and sometimes even being actively enabled by big tech) to further their goals; through misinformation and disinformation, trickery, and speed of reaction.
Unions and tech: a webinar and blog series
On 22 September 2026 Unions 21 will host a webinar to launch a series of blogs around technology policy at unions. These blogs have been written based on conversations with leaders in the tech for unions sector. The blogs cover the following key themes:
What can unions learn from hostile actors’ use of technology? What are the far right or other hostile actors doing well with technology? Should we copy them? Spoiler alert: there was some disagreement on this topic.
What do unions need to do to successfully use technology? Success in technology is about a lot more than buying a tool: you need to build capability, get permission for experimentation and support staff with time and training.
How can we build power in our approach to technology adoption? Our contributors were clear: unions need to lean into existing sources of power, like our democracy, rather than seek to be something we’re not. This might mean we’re not as fast as others, but that doesn’t need to be a bad thing.
You can register for the webinar now:
The blogs will be published in the days following the webinar.
The tech for unions ecosystem
To produce the blogs we’ve spoken to seven organisations who are passionate about supporting unions build their strength using technology (including AI):
Craig Johnson, President and CTO of Change Agent, a company building an LLM-based (AI) tool specifically for progressive organisations.
Ned Howey, CEO of Tectonica, a company building AI-driven products to help progressive organisations deepen their organising, not replace it with easy transactional asks.
Sam Jeffers, partner of Join Together, a co-operative building software to help workers join unions online quickly and easily, with higher-quality and more complete data for the union.
Jonathan Tanner, Founder of Rootcause, a not-for-profit building tools that help progressive organisations build their information power in a world where it is getting ever-more complex to monitor and respond.
Peyman Owladi, Founder of Poteris, a co-operative building bespoke tools (like PCS’s Rep Coach) for unions that want to connect better with their members.
Antti Mäki of Uniofy, a company building comprehensive digital organising software for the union movement.
Digital/Organizing (Switzerland), a full-service digital agency for progressive causes, building the campaign infrastructure and running the communications, fundraising and mobilisation work on top of it.
The insights these seven organisations have given are featured throughout the series and are really powerful – we’ll publish their full interviews alongside the blogs.
But it is also telling how few people we could think of to invite to participate in this series (and, for full disclosure, I know two really well: I work part-time for Rootcause and advise Tectonica). In my career I’ve worked with both not-for-profits and trade unions. I know hundreds of “tech for good” product makers, agencies, consultants, and more supporting non-profits. But I know very few tech sector organisations and people that understand how unions really work and want to support them in the same way. There’s no comparison: the tech for unions ecosystem is much, much smaller.
So with this series, apart from looking into the issues of whether, how and where unions can use technology to build their power, we have made a specific choice to talk to organisations in the small tech for unions ecosystem – to give those union staff who ask whether there’s an alternative to big tech a chance to meet the alternative that exists already.
"[I wish for] A union-owned nonprofit or consortium to ensure the data is in movement hands, not corporate hands." — ITUC, 2025
Ultimately, every union buying the safe, off-the-shelf software option is making a defensible decision on its own terms – members' money, organisers' time, limited appetite for risk, and memories of bespoke CRM or website projects that went badly. But the aggregate of all those sensible decisions is an ecosystem in which few small union-focused alternatives ever reach the scale that makes their business viable. If unions want an alternative to big tech supporting unions, unions will have to exercise their collective market power to do so. No institution in the economy understands collective leverage better than a trade union.
