AI Data Center Supplier Quanta Computer Launches Union-Busting Campaign, Workers Assert Their Right to Organize

Quanta Worker Correspondent

Quanta Computer Tennessee launched an aggressive union-busting campaign since my coworkers and I shared an article from The Worker before our shift on September 1. The article accurately exposed the brutal working conditions we endure at the company, and word of it quickly spread all over the shop floor.

Management panicked. Area leaders and captains, desperate to find out which employee had leaked the story, started interrogating everyone and reviewing the security cameras. Employees who had previously aired grievances were particularly targeted by management’s retaliatory persecution.

The next day, line captains called mandatory meetings to discuss the article, where they lied to cause fear and intimidation. This is a common union-busting practice known as “Captive Audience Meetings”. In these meetings, managers usually parrot the same old lies, including that the company could close if workers organize. Captive audience meetings were ruled illegal in 2024, although the ruling is currently being challenged by employers like Amazon.

Quanta deployed other common union-busting tactics to seed doubt and division amongst us. This week, while some of my coworkers reported retaliation and hostility, some reported a decrease in work speeds and even the promise that Quanta would install AC at the warehouse. Others even saw managers bring food to some employees. This tactic is often referred to as a “pizza party”, used to trick us into thinking that management is our friend and that we should accept our exploitation in exchange for the little crumbs they throw at us. They wouldn’t be throwing these crumbs at us if we weren’t organizing to begin with.

Because most of us working at Quanta are foreign-born women, bosses think that they can intimidate us easily.

While some coworkers might fall for the intimidation, a growing number of us know that the working class struggled tooth and nail to win the right to organize in the United States—a right we must defend. Thanks to the class-conscious and self-sacrificing workers that waged massive, prolonged strikes in the 1930s and the decades prior, today my coworkers and I have the right to make collective demands and share information about working conditions during non-work hours, even without representation by a formal union. This is exactly what my coworkers and I did on September 1.

Under the right to organize, coded in the National Labor Relations Act, employers cannot legally discipline, fire, manipulate, or spy on workers for organizing—which includes anything from forming a union to two coworkers discussing grievances during lunch.

Workers can win, but only when we act collectively. In the past few years, dozens of employees have tried fighting against Quanta individually, and left their jobs frustrated and hopeless. In contrast, Quanta workers in Shanghai won significant raises in 2022 after they rebelled against Quanta holding them hostage inside the factory for weeks.

Collectively, we have leverage and Quanta knows. Most of our work cannot be automated. It took several months for us to gain the necessary expertise to produce high-quality servers that do not frequently explode after they are made.

Quanta’s production quotas are tied to the construction of new data centers like Google’s multi-billion-dollar facility in West Memphis. Without us workers, Quanta cannot meet these quotas. We are the backbone of the AI server manufacturing industry.

We are looking for worker correspondents: cashiers, drivers, nurses, construction workers, cleaners, warehouse staff—anyone who wants to report on what’s really happening at work. Share a story, a tip, a victory, or a fightback. We’ll help you turn it into an article. Contact us at theworkerpaper@proton.me.

Image: Quanta Computer B7 in La Vergne, Tennessee. Credit: Google, 2022.

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