2022 saw an unprecedented rise in labor organizing in U.S. tech firms, with some workers pushing for collective rights just as a tanking economy changed the industry's dynamics, Axios' Peter Allen Clark reports.

Yes, but: So far, tech's labor activism has largely moved on the margins of the industry, with Amazon warehouse workers, Apple Store employees and video game QA testers leading organizing efforts, while engineers, product teams and other headquarters staff mostly shied away.

Here's where tech workers unionized in 2022:

The staff at a Staten Island Amazon warehouse in April voted to form the retail giant's first union in the U.S. after workers voted against unionization last year in Alabama.

• In May, a second Staten Island warehouse voted to reject a union, and an upstate New York warehouse did the same in October. But new efforts continue to pop up, most recently in North Carolina and Kentucky.

Workers at several Apple Stores voted to unionize this year, including at Apple's flagship store in New York City's Grand Central Terminal in April, a store in Maryland in June and a store in Oklahoma City in October.

• A retail store in Atlanta canceled a vote to unionize with workers there reportedly saying they felt intimidated, and last week the National Labor Relations Board accused Apple of using union-busting tactics at the location.

Collective action pressure within the video game industry has been building for years, with workers citing punishing schedules and hostile work environments. 2022 saw the first U.S. union formed in a big game publisher.

• Raven Software, owned by Activision Blizzard, unionized in May after the NLRB ruled against an Activision Blizzard challenge to the vote. Testers at Activision Blizzard Albany unionized this month.

Between the lines: Those moves mean that Microsoft, which still hopes to close its acquisition of Activision Blizzard despite regulatory challenges, will soon become a union employer.

• In June, Microsoft announced it had reached a "neutrality pact" with the union that has organized Activision workers and pledged not to interfere with unionization drives.
• Last week, hundreds of workers in the ZeniMax Studio Group, which Microsoft purchased for $7.5 billion in 2020, announced they were taking steps to vote on unionization.

Zoom out: Tech's outburst of organizing overcame decades of Silicon Valley resistance to labor unions.

• The industry rose in the '80s and '90s in an era dominated by free-market ideas. Most tech leaders and many workers saw unions as a relic of the analog past, a drag on the economy and a constraint on their flexibility and efficiency.
• The tech industry operates under an implicit bargain with skilled workers: They get stock option ownership and high pay in return for keeping the workplace union-free.
• Now, though, the pull of the tech-firm stock-option magnet has weakened, at least briefly, as the industry faces its worst downturn in two decades.

What they're saying: "The rate of organizing and the significance of the wins that we're seeing is like nothing I've experienced in my lifetime," Sara Steffens, secretary-treasurer of the Communications Workers of America, which has been involved in several tech organization efforts, told Axios.

• Steffens attributed 2022's rise in tech unions to pandemic-driven cultural shifts and long- germinating efforts to organize.

Steffens praised Microsoft's approach as "showing the other tech companies that there's a different way to do this, besides digging in and fighting — that you could actually support your workers rights to make this decision on their own through an orderly process."

What's next: Tech's labor organizing is still in its infancy.

• Only a few unions have successfully formed, and most of those still face the often-arduous process of negotiating contracts with employers.

Pandemic-driven labor shortages gave workers an unusual boost in leverage for a time, but that dynamic could change again as the economy slows down.

• The tech industry laid off over 120,000 employees in 2022.

The bottom line: Steffens predicts that the "exponential" momentum built in 2022 will continue in 2023.

Here's the latest from Elon Musk's Twitter this weekend:

Twitter Blue: After a disastrous relaunch and weeks of delay, Twitter's revamped subscription service is supposed to reopen today, Twitter announced Saturday.

• Paying users will get their own blue check mark after a verification process.
• The price is now $8 a month for those who sign up via Twitter's website and $11 for those who do so via the iOS app, to cover Apple's cut.

Community Notes: Twitter has now rolled out the feature (formerly known as Birdwatch) around the world.

Bot crackdown: Elon Musk said Sunday that Twitter is pursuing a fresh crackdown on bots and promised to block the IP addresses of repeat offenders.

More "Twitter Files": Musk unveiled two more installments of the series, in which outside writers have dug through Twitter's internal communications.

• On Friday, Matt Taibbi looked at Twitter's policies and actions in the period leading up to the Jan. 6 storming of the Capitol. Saturday’s installment, by Michael Shellenberger, explored Twitter's decision to ban President Trump following the insurrection.
• Once again, people made of them what they saw. Right-wing figures complained that Twitter had engaged in censorship. Others — including experts in content moderation — saw Twitter struggling to handle a crisis after Trump used its platform to foment a violent assault.

Musk's attacks:

• On Saturday, Musk dangerously and baselessly suggested in a tweet that Twitter's openly gay former head of trust and safety, Yoel Roth, was in favor of sexualizing children, pointing to an excerpt from Roth's Ph.D thesis that did not support the charge.
• On Sunday, Musk tweeted, "My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci," extending two of his frequent refrains: attacking COVID science and mocking transgender people.

The tech industry has produced ambitious pledges and tangible steps to limit climate change — but it's also responsible for emissions that make the problem worse, Axios' Ben Geman and I report in a new Axios Deep Dive on climate truths.

Why it matters: Giants like Amazon, Microsoft, Apple and Google are important — but also controversial — corporate actors on climate change.

The big picture: These and other companies have high-profile pledges and multibillion-dollar initiatives to cut their own emissions, work with suppliers, and seed startups in carbon removal and other climate technologies.

• But the industry's massive operations and supply chains — think data centers, on-demand package delivery and much more — require large amounts of energy that's often met with fossil fuels.

Tech's efforts on climate:

1) Pledges and finance. A number of the largest tech companies have made bold climate commitments. For instance, Microsoft has vowed to reach "net-zero" emissions by 2030.

• Amazon vows to be "net-zero" emissions by 2040 — no small thing considering its mammoth delivery fleets.
• But critics say that many of the tech industry's pledges are vague and overly reliant on offsets for reaching their goals.
• "There are serious questions about the integrity of some of those pledges," Greenpeace USA special projects manager Rolf Sklar told Axios.

2) Renewables. Big Tech companies are also big players in renewables and electric vehicles.

Read the rest.

On Tap

• Oracle is slated to report earnings after the markets close.

ICYMI

• Inside the global race to build a powerful quantum computer. (New Yorker)

There was some incredible soccer in Saturday's World Cup matches, but I was particularly struck by the heartwarming moments that followed Morocco's stunning upset of Portugal, which included one player kicking the ball with his son and another celebrating with his mother.