These Union-Seeking Coders Will Test Trump's Job-Saving Promises

By January, Bjorn Westergard says, he and his fellow coders had finally had enough. In the space of two months, Lanetix, the Bay Area cloud-software startup he worked for, had allegedly dismissed a colleague who’d advocated for more paid time off, discouraged the remaining staff from discussing workplace problems, and implied that their jobs could move to Eastern Europe. So Westergard helped persuade the company’s dozen other software engineers, spread between San Francisco and Arlington, Va., to do something almost unheard-of in the field: organize a union. Together, he believed, they could demand some job security, improve their working conditions, and set an example for the rest of the industry. “I was really hoping we could plant the flag and say, ‘Hey, this is something that can make companies better,’ ” he says.

Lanetix hasn’t yet set the example Westergard wanted. The engineers say that about a week after a majority of them petitioned to unionize, higher-ups told them their positions were all being eliminated, effective immediately. The employees suspected this meant their jobs were headed to the new Eastern European engineering center announced weeks earlier, but the company wouldn’t answer their questions. Now the coders are bringing their case to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), testing the Trump administration’s repeated promises to stop U.S. companies from shifting jobs abroad.