Coders Want to Unionize—with Help from Trump

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, ...