The first time Nabisco tried to close its Pittsburgh factory in 1982, a coalition of labor unions and politicians successfully fought back, preserving hundreds of jobs and the smell of baking cookies in the city’s East Liberty neighborhood. Sixteen years, three free-market presidents and numerous international trade deals later, Nabisco successfully shuttered the plant for good, laying off about 350 workers and leaving behind a hulking brick monument to the Pennsylvania city’s storied industrial past.

Today, the old factory building has been transformed into a shiny testament to Pittsburgh’s future: the luxuriously renovated Bakery Square is home to hundreds of Google employees, assembly lines and industrial ovens replaced with cubicles, meeting rooms and an indoor bamboo garden, the only hint of the manufacturing past in a few tasteful design flourishes.

On Tuesday, Google’s Pittsburgh office could experience a striking return to Pittsburgh’s industrial roots when a group of about 90 analysts will hold an election to decide whether to form a union with the United Steelworkers (USW). The workers, who are employed by the Indian outsourcing firm HCL America but work on Google projects at Google’s offices, are just a tiny fraction of the legions of temps, vendors and contractors (TVCs) who make up an enormous “shadow” workforce at Google, outnumbering direct Google employees approximately 135,000 to 115,000.

If their campaign is successful, they will become what is believed to be the first group of professional tech workers to unionize in the US since a wave of workplace activism began to roil the industry in the wake of Donald Trump’s election.

In some ways, these workers are marginal to the broader tech industry. They live and work far from its center of gravity in Silicon Valley, and their actual employer is not exactly a household name. But they also sit at the center of urgent questions about the future of a tech-driven economy.

Pittsburgh, the quintessential post-industrial city that lost half its population after the US steel industry collapsed in the 1980s, has enjoyed a tech-fueled renaissance in recent years as major companies including Google, Uber, Apple and Facebook opened offices there. The benefits of that economic rebirth have been distributed unevenly, community activists say, in part due to the industry’s reliance on huge numbers of contractors – from Uber drivers to Google’s TVCs – and preference to offer direct employment to as few people as possible.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Google office in Bakery Square which used to be a Nabisco factory. Photograph: Michael Santiago/The Guardian

But as much as the tech industry has transformed Pittsburgh, it’s possible that Pittsburgh could transform the tech industry. After all, this is the city that gave birth to both the American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations, which eventually merged to form the AFL-CIO, the country’s largest federation of unions, as well as the USW. That a campaign to challenge the severe power imbalance between subcontracted tech workers and one of the most powerful corporations in the world should emerge here is only in keeping with historical precedent.

“In the 1930s, our union was created when there was a small group of workers who said, ‘No more,’” said Maria Somma, the organizing director for the USW. “It was when they were courageous enough to do that that it allowed the rest of the sector to unionize.”

Somma joined the USW from a nurse’s union 18 years ago, when the USW set its sights on organizing workers from new industries, including healthcare, education and, now, tech. At her office in the USW’s downtown Pittsburgh headquarters, a large poster celebrates the union’s recent success in organizing the 300 librarians and other staff of the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh system with the slogan, “Hahahaha, suck it Andrew Carnegie! We won!” beside a crossed-out photo of the 19th-century steel magnate’s face.

“The HCL workers are the first group that’s daring enough – understanding the precarity of their situation – to say we’ve got to take a step,” she said. “That to me is unbelievably brave. You want to see working-class heroes in today’s modern world, look at them.”

A history of workers fighting back

In Pittsburgh, technology and labor have always been inextricably linked.

It was the Bessemer converter – a furnace used to create steel in what’s known as the Bessemer process – and other technological innovations that revolutionized the steel industry, turning Carnegie’s Homestead steel mill, located just a few miles upriver from Pittsburgh, into a kind of late-19th-century Google, with the most advanced tech creating the most extraordinary wealth, as well as severe inequality and labor strife.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Josh Borden, a Google contractor, in Pittsburgh. Photograph: Michael Santiago/The Guardian

Homestead was “the most modern mill in the country”, explained Rosemary Trump, a retired labor leader, on a recent trip to the historic site. The mill itself no longer exists, shuttered in 1986 along with most of the other steel mills that once lined the Monongahela River and replaced with a shopping mall and housing development.

But the red-brick pump house, which once supplied the factory with water from the river, still stands as a monument to the bloody history of the 1892 Homestead strike, in which thousands of striking workers faced off with hundreds of Pinkerton agents (a private police force used by industrialist to control workers) sent to take control of the mill by Carnegie’s agent, Henry Clay Frick. The resulting gun battle left seven strikers and three Pinkertons dead.

The Battle of Homestead was the result of “a radical transformation of technology that completely changed the relationship between workers and owners”, said Charlie McCollester, a retired labor activist and historian. Before the invention of the Bessemer process, a small group of highly skilled workers known as puddlers were essential to the process of turning iron into steel. After Henry Bessemer’s innovation, McCollester explained, “The equipment was in charge. The workers became ‘hands’ and had much less control.’” Meanwhile, productivity exploded, with mills going from producing 100 pounds of steel at a time to 100 tons.

“We see an analogy with IT for young people,” McCollester said as we drove through Homestead. The town’s economic recovery is evident, though shaky; on one street we pass a crumbling former municipal building where the labor leader Mary Harris “Mother” Jones was jailed for supporting a strike in 1919, as well as an imposing old bank building that was recently converted into a recreational axe-throwing gym. “We are facing as much of a shift now.”

Indeed, the HCL contractors are perfect examples of how technology is affecting not just blue-collar workers but professionals as well. The five HCL workers interviewed by the Guardian were all college educated and most were professionally fluent in multiple languages. Their work is complex, technical and, according to one Google Pittsburgh employee who spoke to the Guardian on condition of anonymity because she was not authorized to speak to the media, “crucial to our actual business”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Sunrise over factories in the city’s Braddock neighborhood. Photograph: Michael Santiago/The Guardian

That they are nevertheless deemed not crucial enough to be hired as direct Google employees “exposes the contradiction” in Silicon Valley’s major philanthropic endeavors, said Alex Wallach Hanson, an organizer with community group Pittsburgh United. “They dedicate all their philanthropy to telling particularly black and brown students that they need to learn to code and then they can achieve what tech workers are getting,” he said. “But they’re not actually creating those pathways [to direct employment].”

Comparisons between today’s tech billionaires and the robber barons of the Gilded Age are practically cliche, but they resonate for a reason, especially in Pittsburgh where Carnegie’s legacy as a union buster is as present as the libraries, universities and cultural institutions he funded.

“Carnegie was the richest man of his time,” McCollester said. “He gave away his money, but it was on his terms, to things he wanted, while the people who worked for him were living in poverty.”

The high-paying jobs go largely to white people who aren’t from Pittsburgh Alex Wallach Hanson, organizer

The richest man of this time, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, has complained that “the only way” he can come up with to spend his incredible wealth is to fund space travel. Meanwhile, on 12 September, Amazon-owned Whole Foods confirmed that it was cutting medical benefits for nearly 2,000 part-time workers.

In Pittsburgh, Amazon’s high-end grocery chain has been embroiled in controversy over plans to open a store in a development near Google’s offices in East Liberty – a historically African American neighborhood that is gentrifying rapidly. The Whole Foods is slated for a lot that was cleared for development by the mass eviction of about 200 residents, many of them elderly and low-income.

“The high-paying jobs go largely to white people who aren’t from Pittsburgh, like the six-figure traditional coder jobs that people envision when they think of the tech industry,” Wallach Hanson said, adding that local people of color and women are largely relegated to lower-wage service sector roles.

“They try to sell it as this new economy, but the reality is for workers it’s still the same. Corporations are still coming into our city and making incredible profits while creating massive inequality. The world can change so much and yet it can remain the same.”

‘On the edge of a cliff’

Despite the potential historical resonance, the goals of the HCL contractors are decidedly modest.

“I didn’t go into this really trying to shake the structure of work in the technology industry,” said Renata Nelson, a member of the organizing committee. “I just want myself and my co-workers to be happy and feel secure in our workplace.”

The union drive began in early 2019 when one HCL contractor, Ben Gwin, contacted the USW to see if the union could help with his frustrations with his employer. The idea of unionization found fertile ground among workers who were surrounded every day by reminders of how much better Googlers had it than they did. (“It’s like there’s a party happening and some people have to watch it and not come in,” one Pittsburgh Googler told the Guardian of the disparate treatment.)

Low pay, stingy time off, a lack of responsiveness from management and a constant sense of precarity were common concerns among the HCL workers who spoke to the Guardian. “There’s no guarantee that from one Monday to the next we will have a job,” said Josh Borden, who has worked for HCL for three and a half years. “It feels like being on the edge of a cliff all the time.”

I’ve put in the loyalty and the time and the energy, and it’s just like there’s no reward at the end of the tunnel Gabrielle Norton-Moore, Google contractor

“From the time I was hired until now, me and my colleagues have been asking for certain things, like a couple extra vacation days, a better healthcare plan, more pay sometimes,” said another HCL worker, Johanne Rokholt. “The answer is always, ‘We’re doing as much as we can … You are lucky and you should feel grateful.’ It’s a one-sided conversation and I would like to see it be a dialogue.”

Several of the HCL contractors also expressed frustration with the two-tiered system that allows them to work on Google projects with Google employees in Google’s offices, but doesn’t provide them with the pay or security that direct employees earn.

“I’ve been here five years,” said Gabrielle Norton-Moore, who has been at Google Pittsburgh since before HCL got its contract there and says she often feels like a “peasant” at work. “I’ve put in the loyalty and the time and the energy and everything, and it’s just like, there’s no reward at the end of the tunnel.”

The union effort is being closely watched by Googlers, many of whom have participated in their own workplace activism in recent years, including the November 2018 walkout over the company’s handling of sexual harassment.

A Google software engineer who has worked in the Pittsburgh office for nearly 10 years, Todd Derr, said that he “fully supports” the unionization effort. “I consider everyone who works in the office (and the whole company) to be co-workers, regardless of who technically employs them.”

When the HCL workers went public with their union drive, some Googlers published a letter of support and compiled a slide deck of memes with messages of support. After HCL began an anti-union campaign, Googlers published a petition calling on Google to sign a “neutrality agreement”, urging them to condemn the “use of union-busting consultants” by HCL.

“Google must commit to a fair election, free of interference, and oppose unfair interference by their business partner, HCL,” one of the Googlers involved with the petition told the Guardian. “They must commit to maintain their contract with HCL, without regard for whether or not those employees vote to unionize.”

Jenn Kaiser, a spokeswoman for Google, said in a statement: “We work with lots of partners, many of which have unionized workforces, and many of which don’t. As with all our partners, whether HCL’s employees unionize or not is between them and their employer.”

Meenakshi Benjwal, HCL’s head of external communications, said in a statement: “We respect our employees legal right to decide whether or not they want to be represented by a union and are dedicated to fostering an inclusive and open office culture for all of our team members at HCL.”

The Pittsburgh Googler who spoke on condition of anonymity said that she was excited by the union drive.

“I understand in the case of something like restaurant services or custodial services why [Google would use] a separate contracting company,” she said. “It’s harder for me to understand why there’s a separate contracting company for people who are helping build our core business, which is software.”

“Pittsburgh’s the right city for it,” she added. “We’re an industrial city and there’s a whole history of unionization here … Pittsburgh is positioning itself for moving from the steel industry to more of the tech industry and medical industry. I think it’s really appropriate that some of the other ethos of Pittsburgh moves with it.”

Indeed, according to Somma, some Google employees have already gotten in touch with the USW.

“There’s been a few,” Somma said. “Google employees – they’re self-organizing, they’re walking out based on social issues, so they understand their power. They’re walking out to send a message to Google. But they’re doing it for others. Now the question is: are they willing to do it for themselves?”