There’s a story in tech that goes something like so: tech workers are some of the highest paid and most coddled workers around, and therefore they don’t need anything as dusty and plebeian as a union. This was, I’d argue, never really true, but it seems even obviously less true today, what with massive layoffs, coercive RTO plans, an astonishing amount of hype about so-called AI, and more and more tech companies implicated in everything from enabling election interference to accelerating hate speech to fomenting genocide. In this, the latest book from Ethan Marcotte (he of responsive web design fame), unions aren’t anachronisms but rather a set of structures for workers to practice mutual aid, solidarity, and democracy with each other and across their workplaces—practices which are necessary not only for improving working conditions but also for attending to the harms the industry continues to commit. While making a full-throated argument for unions, Marcotte is also honest (and instructive) about how much of a fight it can be to pull them off. Which of course begs the question: if unions really are a useless thing of the past, why are some people fighting so hard to stop them?