At TechEquity Action, we’re committed to advancing policy and candidates that will protect workers, produce more housing, preserve existing affordable housing, and protect tenants.

Our Values

We Are Anti-Racist

Racism is embedded in our economic, political, and social systems. It’s embedded in us all. To do this work right, we practice anti-racism both internally in our organizational practices and externally in our education, our public policy advocacy, and in our corporate guidance. That means being explicit about how racism and racial bias are produced and maintained in our issue areas, and crafting policy solutions that build racial equity in response.

Antiracist: One who is supporting an antiracist policy through their actions or expressing an antiracist idea…An antiracist policy is any measure that produces or sustains racial equity between racial groups. By policy, I mean written and unwritten laws, rules, procedures, processes, regulations, and guidelines that govern people. There is no such thing as a nonracist or race-neutral policy. Every policy in every institution in every community in every nation is producing or sustaining either racial inequity or equity between racial groups.

– Ibram X. Kendi

We Are Solutions-Oriented, but Not Solutionists

We know that in order to achieve true economic justice and resilience for all, we need bold solutions to our urgent problems. At the same time, our approach to developing these solutions must be grounded in a deep understanding of history and strong trusted relationships with our most impacted communities. We can’t hack our way out of these problems; we need to work together to enact thoughtful, long-term solutions.

We Work In Partnership

We recognize that our organization and our members come from a place of privilege. We know that we’re working alongside people and communities that have been under-resourced and marginalized for decades, and so we show up conscious of the space we take and use our power to center the voices of those who are closest to the problems. 

We see ourselves as adding capacity to existing struggle while providing leadership in the spaces where we’re needed. We believe in the adage “if you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together.”

We Are Independent

Our policy positions are determined through consultation with our members, our community partners, our expert advisors, and our staff. We ground all of our decision-making in our issue area platforms (housing and workforce & labor).

While we value our corporate partners and institutional funders, they do not have a say in the development of our policy positions. Our corporate partnerships are crucial for driving equitable corporate practice, but we often disagree on key points of policy. We have taken—and will continue to take—publicly divergent stances on key issues. We view our independent, honest, and sometimes contrary voice as a value to our corporate partners and only work with partners who feel the same. 

We Build Transformative Connection

For too long, the tech industry has created a siloed existence for its workers, away from the communities in which they live and work. We believe that connecting tech workers to their neighbors is critical for making the tech industry an equitable force in our economy. We seek out opportunities to build bridges between people and groups, establishing common ground from which we can work together.

We Welcome Everyone

We are a community that appreciates a wide range of perspectives—as long as those perspectives respect everyone’s humanity. We know that we each come into this work from different experiences and that learning from our differences is a generative process.

We strive to create a safe space for learning. That means fostering sometimes-difficult conversations that are always held in good faith and assume the willingness of participants to reach clarity and understanding, if not consensus.

We can disagree and still love each other unless your disagreement is rooted in my oppression and denial of my humanity and right to exist.

– Son of Baldwin (Robert Jones Jr.)

We Engage in Systems Change, Not Charity

While charity work has value, it isn’t what we do. Our work focuses on addressing the root causes of inequity, the upstream forces that create the need for charity in the first place. We believe that those root causes are fundamental power imbalances and that in order to achieve our vision, we have to rebalance power through systems change and policy advocacy.

Our Labor Policy Goals

Protect All Workers

Tech companies and other large corporations have the opportunity and the necessary resources to become model employers for all of their employees—headquarters, warehouse, and contractors—ensuring living wages, affordable benefits, and pathways to economic mobility.

Within the tech sector, we see large disparities emerging between headquarters, warehouse, and contracted workers. Companies must be held accountable to responsible contracting standards, labor protections, respecting the right of employees to organize, and removing artificial barriers between workers that suppress wages, benefits, and working conditions.

Expand and Equip the Workforce

Often we hear of workforce training initiatives, billed to help underserved communities find entry points to good jobs and tech employment. While we support this idea, we know that this is an insufficient strategy. Training as a stand-alone approach will not lead us out of inequality and will not guarantee employment for most displaced workers. In order to solve this crisis, we must undertake multiple strategies—massive jobs programs, high labor standards and protections for all jobs, and innovative recruitment, training, and development of new and diverse talent.

At the same time, the tech industry, which is notoriously exclusive, has an imperative to make its employee base more representative of the population at large—not just to create broader economic opportunity, but because companies with diverse representation at all levels are more likely to be successful than those that aren’t. Diverse representation also makes companies more likely to avoid product and business decisions that harm society.

Meet Everyone’s Basic Needs

As inequality deepens and corporate power grows, many workers cannot make ends meet while working full-time and often multiple jobs. Our limited social framework provides meager benefits to those living in abject poverty, but ignores that the majority of Americans struggle to access healthcare, pay rent, and afford child care. This approach leaves millions of workers and their families on a precipice where one emergency can push them into poverty, homelessness or worse.

We need a new social contract that ensures everyone has the basics to survive. We are intrigued by bold ideas being put forth in California and across the nation for guaranteed income, affordable public healthcare, secure publicly-held retirements, portable employment benefits, and more. We must strengthen our social safety net such that no one falls through the cracks.

Our Housing Policy Goals

Production

We must build more housing at all income levels, with a priority for affordable housing.

The state needs 180,000 new units of housing every year to keep up with population growth. Over the past ten years, we have averaged only 80,000 units per year. Breaking the gridlock that creates this restriction of supply will require us to look at every side of the issue. We’ll need to innovate where it’s possible, and change political will where it’s not.

While we wait for new housing production to come online, we need to enact policies that prevent renters and low-income homeowners from losing their homes.

Protection and Preservation 

We must protect vulnerable communities from being pushed out and preserve affordable housing where it already exists

While we wait for new housing production to come online, we need to enact policies that prevent renters and low-income homeowners from losing their homes. The passage of the California Tenant Protection Act of 2019 was a big first step, now we need to make sure those expanded protections are enforced.

We also need to preserve as much existing affordable housing as possible, supporting new forms of ownership such as land trusts and providing funds for nonprofit developers and public agencies to purchase privately-owned buildings to convert to permanent affordable housing.

Acknowledge and account for the racial bias inherent in the system

Underlying both of these policy priorities is a need to acknowledge that current settlement patterns and housing systems are built on a legacy of racism. Any work on housing policy must take this history into account, and support efforts to undo the effects of decades of government-sanctioned segregation and lack of investment in communities of color (particularly black communities).

This means racial impacts must be included in decisions about the location and prioritization of developments and that we should favor projects that bring benefits to existing community members. We also must hold communities that have traditionally practiced exclusion in their zoning and housing policies to account, and pursue policies that can add housing opportunities for all income levels in these places.