Coworker.org

Coworker.org is a US-based nonprofit platform founded in 2013 by Jess Kutch and Michelle Miller to give workers the tools, training, and strategic support to run campaigns for workplace improvements — the first digital organizing infrastructure built from the ground up for the unorganized workforce. Where traditional union campaigns require formal recognition and collective bargaining, Coworker.org operates at the petition and campaign layer: workers create campaigns, build colleague support, and press employers for specific changes without joining or forming a union. In its first decade the platform supported campaigns across retail, tech, gig, and service sectors, scoring documented wins on scheduling, wages, safety, parental leave, and dress codes. Its workplace technology research program — the Bossware and Employment Tech Database and the companion "Little Tech Is Coming for Workers" report — positioned the organization as one of the early civil-society voices naming AI and algorithmic management as structural threats to labor.

Founding and organizational model

Jess Kutch came to Coworker.org from Change.org, where she served as organizing director, and before that from SEIU, where she spent five years directing online campaigns and developing digital strategies for worksite organizing and issue campaigning. Michelle Miller brought experience from SEIU's creative media work on service-worker campaigns. Together they built Coworker on a theory that digital tools could serve as a "front doorstep" to the labor movement — enabling workers to dip into collective action and develop organizing skills without waiting for the institutional labor movement to reach them. The Service Employees International Union provided $200,000 in seed funding in 2013; the organization launched under fiscal sponsorship of the New Venture Fund. In 2014, both co-founders received Echoing Green Fellowships, an early validation of the model. Alongside the main platform, Coworker.org launched the Coworker Solidarity Fund — a sister 501(c)(4) mutual aid organization providing direct financial support to workers facing retaliation for organizing, with particular focus on tech-sector workers. Both co-founders stepped down as co-executive directors at the end of March 2023, announcing a strategic evolution from petition platform toward "a whole suite of options" along the organizing journey. Nur, who joined Coworker in 2019 as a Campaign Strategist after a decade of grassroots organizing with SEIU's Fight For $15 and the National Domestic Workers Alliance, was named Executive Director effective May 1, 2024.

Campaigns and platform victories

The platform's most prominent early win — Starbucks' reversal of its ban on visible tattoos — began when an Atlanta barista's 2014 petition drew support from workers across 17 countries; Starbucks reversed the policy in October 2014. Subsequent Starbucks campaigns organized by workers on the platform secured expanded paid parental leave for barista dads and adoptive parents, scheduling technology updates to prevent "clopening" shifts, and safe needle disposal in bathrooms. Wells Fargo employees used Coworker campaigns to successfully pressure the company to eliminate predatory internal sales goals. In the gig economy, thousands of Uber drivers organized through Coworker and won the addition of an in-app tipping feature. Workers at Chicago-area Amazon warehouses secured paid time off during extreme heat conditions — the first time Amazon workers won this protection. Coworker frames these victories collectively as workers gaining experience with collective action and understanding themselves as agents of change, regardless of the specific form an organizing effort takes.

Gig and platform worker organizing

Algorithmic deactivation — the automated removal of gig workers from platforms on which they depend for income, without transparent process or effective appeal — became a defining labor issue for the gig economy. In September 2018, Gig Workers Rising used the Coworker platform to launch "Uber and Lyft: Give Drivers a Voice", gathering over 5,000 signatures and delivering the petition in person to both companies' headquarters. The campaign demanded clear pre-deactivation communication, a driver-led appeals process, protections against passenger discrimination inflating or damaging ratings, and restrictions on immediate deactivations to clearly defined extreme circumstances. Coworker.org's Gig Economy project identified platform workers' exposure to opaque algorithmic systems — governing pay, work allocation, performance assessment, and continued platform access — as the frontier of what advocacy organizations needed to build against.

Workplace technology research

Coworker's most substantive intervention on AI and labor was the Bossware and Employment Tech Database, launched on November 17, 2021, cataloging over 550 labor-focused technology products covering every phase of employment — from hiring and screening to productivity monitoring, performance evaluation, and termination. The database documented AI, location tracking, and biometric tools deployed across sectors, frequently without workers' knowledge. The companion report, "Little Tech Is Coming for Workers: A Framework for Reclaiming and Building Worker Power", authored by Wilneida Negrón, PhD — Coworker's Director of Policy and Research — analyzed the findings and identified that over 30 percent of the database's products emerged between 2020 and 2021 alone, reflecting a surge of private capital into workplace surveillance. Specific systems documented included Amazon's automated termination algorithm that generates warnings and terminations based on productivity tracking without human review, emotion detection tools used in hiring assessments, and productivity monitoring platforms marketed specifically to low-wage workers. The report coined the "Little Tech" framing to name the phenomenon: the most harmful labor-management technologies were coming not from the largest consumer tech companies but from a swarm of smaller vendors operating below civil-society scrutiny.

Place in the movement

Coworker.org occupies a distinct position between formal union campaigns and the established digital rights community. Its work on gig and platform workers' exposure to algorithmic management complements the more litigation-focused approach of organizations like the Worker Info Exchange, which uses GDPR access rights to extract algorithmic data from Uber and challenge its management systems in UK courts. Coworker's US footprint, petition-platform model, and bossware research make it a primary entry point for workers at non-union, algorithmically managed employers — including the millions of gig workers who lack the collective bargaining frameworks that shape the AI provisions in WGA and SAG-AFTRA contracts. The Bossware database has been cited in academic and policy research on algorithmic labor management, establishing Coworker as a reference institution for civil-society documentation of workplace surveillance technology in the United States.