A Year in Review: Letter from Catherine Bracy

How we're thinking about 2022 and what's energizing us moving forward.
February 1, 2023
Blog

2022 was a tough year for tech. The pandemic-driven boom came to a bust for many tech companies, leaving about 160,000 tech workers out of a job last year. As is often the case, the fallout disproportionately hit the most marginalized workers in tech. Immigrant workers who have lived here for decades are now scrambling to secure new visas. Contract workers awoke to their jobs being terminated overnight, without so much as a day’s notice. Women and workers of color who chose a career in tech to lift their families out of poverty found themselves unemployed in expensive cities.

This new, uncertain era for tech exposes what we know to be true: we need to reshape our economy to ensure that everyone—content moderators, teachers, software engineers, grocery workers, everyone—has the floor they need to endure the hard times and the ability to benefit from prosperity in the good.

That’s why we focused on understanding inequities in and around tech and exploring ways to close the gaps. In a lot of ways, 2022 was a defining year for TechEquity. By building a foundation of thorough research, we identified key disparities in contract work and brought those learnings to the California state legislature, where we passed one of the strongest pay transparency laws in the country. Using our Contract Worker Disparity Project as a template, we launched an initiative to investigate the intersection of tech and housing: how tech tools are being used to encode bias in tenant screening, accelerate the corporatization of housing stock, and enable opaque alternative home financing options. 

We also examined existing economic justice policies and explored how we could strengthen their impact. We know that any law is only as good as its implementation. Through our community partnerships with housing advocates and original research, we discovered that the Tenant Protection Act of 2019 was only effective if renters knew and could defend their rights. With a team of civic tech volunteers, we launched the Tenant Protections Calculator, the most comprehensive anti-gouging rent calculator in California.

This new, uncertain era for tech exposes what we know to be true: we need to reshape our economy to ensure that everyone—content moderators, teachers, software engineers, grocery workers, everyone—has the floor they need to endure the hard times and the ability to benefit from prosperity in the good.

For us, 2023 is all about building on the foundation we laid in 2022:

  • We’re working in coalition with established labor advocates to craft and pass legislation that empowers all workers, especially contract and temp workers that are left on the margins.
  • We’re deepening our research in the tech + housing space, developing legislation and ethical standards to make the growing PropTech market fairer for everyday people.
  • We’re listening to community and grassroots partners to identify gaps in housing policy implementation. From there we’re building tech and data tools that take policy from talk to action, helping people learn their rights and advocate for more affordable housing.
  • We’re calling on tech workers, activists, community members, and advocates to join us in building a better tech economy.

None of this work would be possible without our community. I’m grateful you’re here with us, and I’m so excited for what’s to come.

Catherine Bracy, CEO and Co-Founder of TechEquity Collaborative