The tech industry's shifting landscape and the growing precarity of its labor force have spurred unionization efforts among tech workers. These workers turn to collective action to improve their working conditions and to protest unethical practices within their workplaces. To better understand this movement, we interviewed 44 U.S.-based tech worker-organizers to examine their motivations, strategies, challenges, and future visions for labor organizing. These workers included engineers, product managers, customer support specialists, QA analysts, logistics workers, gig workers, and union staff organizers. Our findings reveal that, contrary to popular narratives of prestige and privilege within the tech industry, tech workers face fragmented and unstable work environments which contribute to their disempowerment and hinder their organizing efforts. Despite these difficulties, organizers are laying the groundwork for a more resilient tech worker movement through community building and expanding political consciousness. By situating these dynamics within broader structural and ideological forces, we identify ways for the CSCW community to build solidarity with tech workers who are materially transforming our field through their organizing efforts.

With the rise of remote work, a range of surveillance technologies are increasingly being used by business owners to track and monitor employees, raising concerns about worker rights and privacy. Through analysis of Reddit posts and in-depth semi-structured interviews, this paper seeks to understand how workers across a range of sectors make sense of and respond to layered forms of surveillance. While workers express concern about risks to their health, safety, and privacy, they also face a lack of transparency and autonomy around the use of these systems. In response, workers take up tactics of everyday resistance, such as commiserating with other workers or employing technological hacks. Although these tactics demonstrate workers' ingenuity, they also show the limitations of existing approaches to protect workers against intrusive workplace monitoring. We argue that there is an opportunity for CSCW researchers to support these countermeasures through worker-led design and policy.

There have been increasing calls within HCI to build sustained partnerships with communities that go beyond surface-level engagement. However, little is known about how communities view such partnerships and their outcomes. In collaboration with a community-based organization, we co-analyzed a series of interviews to understand the impacts of university-led research initiatives and publicly deployed technologies on local communities, and to explore strategies for more equitable community-university partnerships. Our findings reveal that local communities often perceive technology companies and academic institutions as potential threats due to their shared role in a series of projects, including predictive policing, surveillance, and broader concerns on technological bias and exclusion against minoritized groups. While interviewees named material benefits, sustained relationships, and meaningful accountability as desirable from universities, they pointed to academia's institutional priorities that pose barriers to forming effective partnerships. Drawing from la paperson's concept of a Third University, we argue that researchers and academic institutions must contend with these complexities, while taking a decolonizing approach to community-university partnerships through the lens of revestment.

Design activism is a way for designers and researchers to negotiate societal inequities and resulting implications for design practices. Within HCI and design, community-based methods are a common way to situate design engagements among those directly impacted by social inequities. Despite its potential for social impact, current approaches to design activism can be extractive and at odds with community-aligned advocacy. Drawing on interviews with 32 individuals who use design to address local, social inequities, we extend the current discourse around design activism by exploring 'activist-led design'. We outline four key considerations of this work: understanding activist-led design practices; relationality and community engagements; challenges of doing this work; and democratizing access to design. Our analysis highlights implications for academia's role in design activism. This paper interrogates design activism's role as a social and communal practice, and considers ways to support activist-led design. We propose considerations that contribute to the larger conversation of academic design having more equitable impact.

Ethnic community-based organizations (CBOs) play an essential role in supporting the wellbeing of immigrants and refugees. CBO workers often act as linguistic and cultural translators between communities, government, and health and social service systems. However, resource constraints, technological barriers, and pressures to be data-driven require workers to perform additional forms of translation to ensure their organizations’ survival. Drawing on 16 interviews with members of 7 Asian American and Pacific Islander CBOs, we examine opportunities and barriers concerning their technology-mediated work practices. We identify two circumstances where CBO workers perform translation: (1) as legitimacy work to build trust with funders and communities, and (2) as (re)mediation in attending to technological barriers and resisting hegemonic systems that treat their communities as “other.” By unpacking the politics of translation work across these sites, we position CBO workers as a critical source for HCI research and practice as it seeks to support community wellbeing.